
Two of our fellow CSC members have casted off on an adventure many of us dream of! If you are interested in following their adventure, check out Team Bouchon.
Yalcin (“Turkish guy”) and Marie (“Frenchick”) met here at CSC! For Yalcin his first time on a sailboat was after high school, when he took a keelboat trip in Turkey: “during this trip, we learnt the basics of sailing, how to tie knots, docking, anchoring, basic navigation etc. I got a basic crew certificate, I don't remember which yachting association issued it. I loved it so much! From then on, I always felt like if I ever had a chance to sail my boat full time, I was going to do it.” Yalcin kept sailing while in the Mediterranean, but when he arrived in the USA as a graduate student his dream started to fade as he had not sailed in three years. But then, he found a job in the bay area and started calculating how many years he’d need to work “to get a boat and save some money to sail her for a couple of years. I think I can say that as soon as I found the financial path, I started actively preparing for a trip. I, of course, had no idea what it would look like.”
Marie also had some sailing experience on optimists as a kid, then Hobbie - and she also dreamt of one day sailing the world! These two crossed paths at Cal Sailing Club and started to dream together. At first by racing JY dinghies in our own south sailing basin, then “on the Bay on Ricochet, a Santana 22, and finally on Yalcin’s first keelboat, the beautiful lady Avocet, a Canadian Sailcraft 30 who taught the couple a lot about avoiding crab pods, make pizzas while grounded at the entrance of a cove, chinese gibes, raftups and dipping outside the protective Bay for a couple of days here and there…” They each got their junior skipper dinghy rating at CSC and at some point worked towards senior skipper, but became distracted with their own boat.
They spent lots of time picking out an appropriate boat for them. Finally they purchased Tire-bouchon, an Ericson 38, which they brought from San Diego to Berkeley with our cruising skipper and friend Nick G and started to prepare the boat for an adventure one day, which was a challenge in a foreign country. “Because I didn't know how to find a good service or source some parts. I have some boat building experience, I have curiosity to learn the sailboat systems so I read a lot. Information is excessively available thanks to the internet. But I always had a hard time finding a place that will do the job. Marine stores charge an arm and a leg for any service they offer. The small shops that would do a one off just for fun, some small talk and a small fee simply wasn't available to me in the US” (Yalcin).
“In Turkey, I remember going to a shop that cut large plastic neon letters for store signs and getting them to cut marine plywood for us. We had to bring the right digital format and even the appropriate cutting bit for plywood but they let us use their machine for a few hours for a small charge. I remember helping them with their computer issues during the cuts. There were so many times I needed a tool or a custom job and I knew exactly where I could have gotten it done the way I wanted to if I was in Turkey; but I had to find a workaround because I didn't know any better. CSC was definitely a big resource for all my questions.”