The Roots

I've gotten a few weird looks from folks when I told them what I'm doing, mostly because they don't know my history. I'll attempt to give a quick background, so that anyone coming across this blog will have a better understanding of "why" I'm going down the path I am.

Most of my friends today, know me as a cyclist. For the past 20 years, I have been all about mountain biking and cycling. For the past 8 years, I've been a bike shop owner who raced bikes quite a bit. But my story starts as a kid.

When I was about 5 years old, we spent a lot of time on ski boats on the river. At some point, my parents decided that they wanted a big boat. Boats are expensive, and we didn't have a ton of money, so my dad said "hey, let's build a boat". So he and my uncle bought some blue prints, some tools, secured an area on my grandfather's property and began contruction on 2 similar steel sailboats. I didn't know any better, I just figured thats what people did. I later learned that this was not an everyday thing and was extremely unique. I grew up around raw steel, sandblasting, welding, fabrication and creative concepts. I just figured that's what people did..

8 years after construction began, we launched a 45' steel ketch sailboat into the Sacramento river that bared the name "Kenandora" (my mom and dad's names combined). My uncle's boat took more time as he was spending a little more time on custom interiors and things.

We spent the first few years staying on the boat during the weekends, maybe taking it down to the bay for a few weeks in the summer. But at some point, around the 6th grade, my parents decided that they liked the boat-life so much, that we were going to move aboard full-time. I began 7th grade in a new school as "the kid that lives on a boat". It was cool, unique, and quickly just became a way of life, no different in my mind than anyone else. Soon I had a friend that also lived on a boat and he attended the same school. We were river folk and it was pretty cool. I spent most of my youth fishing, cruising around the river in my little skiff, swimming and being a modern day Huck Finn.

 

High School came and went pretty fast, nothing really to note except some good memories and good friends.

After high school, I started junior college with 13 units. Lasted about a month or two before quitting and going to work full time as a delivery driver. Life was good, making money, knowing fully that I wasn't going to get anywhere as a delivery driver all my life. Luckily (I say this now) I aquired too many traffic violations in that one year as a driver, and my license was going to be revoked. This was the turning point, or should I say, course change #1.

 

The boats we built. My uncle's on the left, ours on the right.

 

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