For a couple living in land-locked Utah, life-long dreams of sailing around the world were always in the back of Dick Peek and Laura Ritter’s minds. For more than 40 years, Peek, who grew up in San Diego, dreamt of sailing around the world. Ritter also grew up sailing and says it was her parents’ dream she lived out.
“I had the dream in my 20s,” Peek said. On KPCW’s “Local News Hour.” “I had it all penciled in, but it took a few decades to let reality catch up. We ended up buying the boat and selling the house in Park City, and the dream came back alive, and off we went.”
Ritter said, “I grew up sailing on Lake Michigan, and my parents had the dream, and especially my mom had the dream, and she never did it. So, when Dick first said, ‘Let’s sell the house to buy a sailboat,’ I'm like, ‘what are you talking about,’ after living in the mountains for all those years. And I decided, why not live the adventure?”
Peek says the boat they used is a 41-foot monohull sloop with a single mast that can support two sails.
“We chose that after some research,” Peek said. “We took a sailing seminar from a well-known cruising couple, and they kind of suggested some good ideas to have in a sailboat, and we kind of followed their advice and eventually found our Sceptre 41 that we renamed Maia after the star in the Pleiades constellation.”
In March 2018, after quitting their jobs, selling their Park City home and spending a few months finding and equipping their sea-home, they launched their journey. When all was said and done, Ritter says they sailed about 42,000 nautical miles, motored some 3,400 hours and traveled to 31 countries.
They took off on their journey from Mexico and headed to the South Pacific. The trip included three big ocean crossings – the longest one – 29 days without setting foot on land - was sailing up the Atlantic from the small island St. Helena to Tobago in the Caribbean.
They had planned to spend a season or so in Australia but while they were there, COVID hit, and they ended up staying a couple of years.
“Which was actually one of the highlights of the trip, at least for me,” Ritter said. “Because we got to sail up and down to the Great Barrier Reef, and we made a lot of good friends and really had a really just fun cruising couple years of not sailing across big oceans.”
Peek says the boat has plenty of storage so carrying enough food and fuel was doable. They carried a watermaker that can make fresh water from salt water.
The two faced a couple of major storms and some mechanical challenges along the way.
“We were off of Africa, between Madagascar and in the Mozambique Channel,” Peek said. “And these thunderstorms would roll up the ocean and then curve into Africa. And we got clipped by one that was very impressive looking. And it turned out to be actually very impressive in reality. So, that was exciting. Mechanical challenges? Yeah, we had various things that would tap into my ability to being a former contractor, just kind of figure it out.”
The two made a good team; Ritter doesn’t like sailing at night – Peek likes the challenge. They both learned when to be quiet and when to talk and gave each other their own space when they needed it.
One of their favorite spots was in the northern Cook Islands in the middle of the Pacific, after a stressful ocean crossing, where they met several people who have become sailing friends.
For now, Maia is home and they plan to travel up the western coast of the U.S. and spend some time in Portland, Oregon, where their son lives. They’re looking into doing some house sitting in different places and not sure they’ll make the move back to Utah.
