We are Celia (the Admiral) and Bruce (the Captain and generally the one to blame for this web site) Bowman. Together we constitute the entire crew of Goosebumps. What follows are thumbnails of who we are and what makes our wheels turn in the direction they do. Most is directed toward sailing, of course, but we'd be pretty boring folks if we didn't have a few other interests too. You'll find a link at the bottom of the page.
Bruce (that'sme) is from California and has been doing this cruising stuff for many years. Born in Stockton, CA, I grew up in Reno, NV then finished high school and college in California. While living in Reno I spotted a framed photo on the wall of my best friend Tommy Farrer's room: a schooner under a heavy press of canvas competing in the TransPac pre-WWII. Funny how a little thing like that can eventually lead to a life afloat. It took a few years, but in 1968 I bought my first sail boat... a Victory 21 fin-keeled daysailer that was trailered around California. Then came an Ericson 30, a Mason 38 and a Gulf 32. All were monohull keel boats which I lived aboard and cruised.
Eventually the pain of cold San Francisco Bay water in the face and down the neck led me to think "there's gotta be a better way"! It wasn't till I met Celia, though, that I finally did the research which led to the discovery of the world of multi-hulls and the foreign concept of sailing (nearly) upright. At first it seemed almost decadent to sail without significant heel and with a good turn of speed while staying dry most of the time, but I adjusted! :-)
Celia was born in Honolulu, HI and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. A graduate of San Francisco State, she was a teacher in the SF school district all her adult life. Her first experience with sailing came earlier than Bruce's. She and her best friend Lynn Frost sailed an El Toro (#150, which they borrowed from Robert Thresh) on Lake Merrit in Oakland, CA during her early teens. Her real passion then was synchronized swimming, but she had fond memories of sailing that El Toro. It wasn't until she met Bruce that she rediscovered her interest in sailing. A course at OCSC in Berkley, CA convinced her that sailing could be a lot of fun. Especially if she didn't have to get bumped and bruised in the tight cockpit of a J24!
We traveled to the Annapolis Boat Show in 2000 to check out multi-hulls and catamarans in particular. Seawind, Maine Cat, PDQ, etc... most of the big names were at the dock at this spectacular October event. It was clear after just a short while that the best value there for our purpose was the Gemini from Performance Cruising Inc. So we whined to Sue Smith (the waiting list at the time was a year) and she obliged by taking our money. During the ensuing wait, a buyer dropped out and our delivery was moved up to fill the empty slot.
With the earlier delivery looming close, what would have been a leisurely planning effort turned into a panic. Suddenly we were throwing everything into a Penske Truck and towing Celia's car cross country to take delivery of GOOSEBUMPS. 3,200 miles later we were standing on the PCI dock looking at our new boat and home. Cool. Now all we had to do was get everything we brought with us stuffed into the new boat and figure out how to sail what had to be the widest boat in the world (if you know something about production catamarans, you probably know that the Gemini is the narrowest 34 foot sailing cat being built today!).
Btw, to make sure we didn't go over the load limit for the Gemini, we recorded the weight of each crate as we packed the pieces in our San Francisco garage. We hauled about 1,200# of everything from galley utensils, books and clothes to our inverter/charger, heavy guage wire and navigation equipment. Missing were the heavier batteries, the SSB, windlass and the watermaker. This 600# feeding binge has kept GOOSEBUMPS on a "diet" from the very beggining!
After (finally!) getting everything aboard it was a case of getting familiar with the boat and doing the modifications necessary to fit our cruising needs. That's the sort of thing you can read about in the logs (what we call the Updates) and in Goosebumps which has info on the boat's equipment.
You can reach us, Celia and Bruce, via e-Mail (celia <at> rabbit-rabbit <dot> org; bruce <at> rabbit-rabbit <dot> org). Also, we have their amateur radio licenses (Celia/K5CMB, Bruce/NM5B) and can be reached via Winlink-2000 when we're on the boat. [ Sorry for having to disguise the e-Mail addresses but the spam is killing us! ]
"Twenty
years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that
you didn't do than by the ones you did do...Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
-Mark Twain