We’re Emily and Lucas, a couple from Michigan cruising on our sailboat, Alaya, in the Great Lakes and beyond.
We are both graduates of the University of Toledo in Ohio and have spent the last 10 years building careers in communications and automotive engineering, respectively. Although we enjoyed our professional careers, we felt like something was missing. In 2018, Lucas stumbled upon the cruising lifestyle while surfing Reddit. After watching a lot of YouTube, reading a variety of sailing books and creating many spreadsheets, we decided to go cruising. We purchased our first boat, Counting Stars, a Catalina 25, in 2019 and it was a great introduction to boat ownership and sailing.
We purchased our current boat, Alaya in October of 2020. She has great bones but needed a lot of upgrades to prepare her for the ocean. We have spent the last three years preparing ourselves and Alaya for the trip. In 2023, we quit our jobs, sold our house and moved aboard.
You can follow our adventure through this blog and on Instagram @sailing.alaya.
About Alaya
Alaya is a Slocum 43 – Pilothouse. She was built in Taiwan in 1986 and we are her fourth owner. Alaya has spent almost her entire life in fresh water, mostly Lake Erie. She’s a cutter rig sailboat with a fiberglass hull. She’s powered by a Peugeot-marinized Lehman diesel engine that we’ve named Pierre Dieselly.
While we have completed a lot of upgrades on Alaya over the past three years, our largest undertaking, by far, has been replacing her chainplates. We removed the original stainless steel, encapsulated chainplates from the hull and then fabricated and installed new titanium plates.
Like all boat owners, we have a lot more projects planned and we’ll post project updates throughout our sailing adventure.
