Thom: As I am still gainfully employed, my view of retirement can only be from observation. I've heard many stories, all differ- ent, about what retire- ment is like. I suppose it is all in what we do with it. Doug has been retired q=% for 5 years now and is busier now than ever so he tells me. I'll let him tell you for himself. Our friends Bob and Fran Reitz just retired this past summer and they promptly took their Catalina 36 down the ICW to Florida. They obviously didn't waste any time doing whatthey wanted to do with their retirement. I know of others who are taking their retirements at a more leisurely pace.
I'm looking forward to mine, hopefully not too many years from now. Assuming all goes well I will be retiring from a good 8-5 Monday through Friday job. It in and of itself is not the reason for retirement. Although the 45-minute commute each way is taking its toll on our cars and me. This being said I do realize that I need to develop something to retire to instead of something to retire from. And that's why this is being written for a sailing magazine. I don't have dreams of sailing off into the sunset to some distant and exotic island paradise (although a charter sail there would be nice). But I do look forward to having more time to maintain and sail our C400, Carter-Creagh. I have expressed my envy to those retirees who have the time and use it well to take care of their boats. For many of us this "labor of love" is one of the great reasons why we have these big expensive boats in the first place. Keeping it clean and waxed, keeping the engine well maintained, building new projects to improve the boat's performance and function and just spending time on the boat is something I really look forward to. That time spent then makes sailing the boat even more enjoyable.
Equally I look forward to more time to devote to our home and our cars with somewhat the same feeling as the boat. I'm sure my partner Doug is looking forward to my time on some of the projects needed around the house.
Doug: Well, I'm on the other side of this issue, having been retired for 5 years from a very active career as a professor in a local east coast college. I was surrounded by people, many of whom were students and faculty members so the idea of suddenly pulling the plug on all this activity to retire, gave me some second thoughts. I wondered how I would fill my days with no more 3hour commutes, and interacting with hundreds, if not thousands of people in a given week. Looking back at it now, I am really surprised that I had the time to teach! How did I do it all? Well, the answer is, I really didn't do it all. A lot of corners were cut in my private and personal life that I choose not to cut anymore. For instance, I now have the time and opportunity to throw myself into my avocations and not just my vocation. Sailing is a very big part of that picture. I find that I spend more time planning and participating in all aspects of yachting. As you know, I hold local and national offices in the Catalina organization and now have the time to actively function at a much deeper level than I ever did before. Organizing for events, rendezvous', boat shows, hosting banquets, travel and annual cruises with our fleet is part of the joy I am experiencing as a retired person. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of scrubbing Carter-Creagh's deck, buffing and polishing the hull and cleaning out the hidden corners long neglected actually puts me much more in touch with our C400. I know our yacht so much better now than in all the eight years we have owned it, I enjoy working with Thom, who is far more competent mechanically and electronically than I will ever be, but I find that inexperienced as I am, I still can come up with ideas and solutions to problems that have vexed us both.
We also down-sized our living arrangements and moved into a much simpler place four years ago. Most people wait until retirement to make this change. I decided, although Thom was not retired, that was no reason not to find a more suitable home for us to live in, close enough to Thom's work and even closer to where Carter-Creagh is docked out on the east end of Long Island, NY. If any of you know anything about real estate on Long Island, you have to get really lucky to find anything affordable and half decent. Well we fell into a rare deal with a condominium that had been used only infrequently a few weeks a year. There was much to do to bring it up to snuff and clear away years of neglect. I had the time and the inclination so the job of general contractor fell to me. We literally tore our new/old condo apart, added a study and modernized the 20-year-old place. I hired carpenters, electricians, plumbers, painters, carpet layers and kitchen specialists to do the job. For three months we lived in boxes and gradually watched our new home grow around us. I could do all this because I was free of the daily responsibilities of a career. Now that it is done we marvel at our condo by the sea. Actually we are perched high on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound where we do most of our sailing, and can follow the sunset as it settles down over Bridgeport, CT and then turn almost 180 degrees past New Haven 17 miles away and Faulkner's Island and look at the roiling hills of Connecticut as they tumble into the Connecticut River Valley. Spectacular skyscapes from dawn to dusk change with each moment and the nights are filled with thousands of stars and bright planets. The Long Island Sound boils with foam on a windy day and flattens to a mirror in a dead calm.
So it would seem that I can sum up my perspective on retirement with the hackneyed phrase: "I have not retired from work, I have retired to achieve the fulfillment of my avocations."
We are learning that retirement in no way means slowing down. Especially since we have become involved in the Catalina community, the pace of life in general seems to have picked up considerably. Not only does writing this column and the section we write for the Catalina 36 Fleet 5 in this magazine take some time, but also being editors for the articles submitted by other C400 owners, being officers in Catalina 36 Fleet-5, maintaining their membership information and doing their newsletters, attending fleet meetings, going to fleet rendezvous and summer cruises. They all take time. And it doesn't stop there. With the good friendships we have developed with these people we plan trips to distant boat shows, charter cruises in far away places, attend their birthday parties, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, and yes we're even there for the hard times: in hospitals and at funerals. This level of companionship takes time but it is time very well spent. We have developed life-long friendships, the value of which cannot be measured. We hope and pray that we have been able to return the favor wherever we go.