We are Paula and Timothy Colwell, former owners of Seawind II Hull #84. Our permanent home is on the island of Faial, in the Azores. Any Seawind (I or II) stopping in Horta Faial is welcome to contact us.

Paula Colwell

[email protected]

Hello Howard,

Thank you so much for posting our invitation on the web site.

You wrote: I would be interested in hearing about your boat and how you wound up in the Azores. I'm sure the group would also.


As it says in the invitation we are the former owners of NIRVANA, Hull 84. In the archives there are two articles concerning NIRVANA. They both appeared in the same issue of SEAWORDS sometime in 1996. The first is a description of all of the upgrades Tim and I made to prepare her for offshore cruising. The second is a letter telling about our accident in Puerto Rico.

This is the introduction I wrote for a quilting mailing list I belong to.

My name is Paula Colwell. My husband and I live on the island of Faial in the Azores.

WHERE? The Azores are a group of nine islands that are part of Portugal and are located 1000 miles west of continental Europe. Yes, we live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The answer to the next question is, "A funny thing happened to us on the way to Ireland."

In 1978 we took delivery of a semi-custom built 32-foot offshore sailboat with the idea that after we retired, we would sail around the world. At that time we lived in the exurbs of Philadelphia Pennsylvania and had a vacation home on the Chesapeake Bay (Crisfield MD).

Tim retired in 1991 (I just quit). At that time his parents were infirm so we limited our sailing to the Bahamas in the winter and the Intracoastal Waterway in the summer. In 1993 my mother-in-law died, in 1994 I had a mastectomy and in 1995 my father-in-law died. We felt it was time to stop procrastinating and live the dream. We had made a prior decision to have a land base in Ireland and sail part of the year. We set sail in the spring of 1995 and 21 days after leaving Bermuda we made our landfall in the Azores at Flores. We had only intended to stop and do laundry and purchase groceries - we did not even have a Portuguese dictionary. We fell in love with the people and the island. Our next stop was Faial. Two weeks later we had purchased a house and barn with land. We stayed until our visa ran out and then turned around and set sail for the USA to complete the paperwork required for Portuguese residency. We were lazy in Puerto Rico, hit a reef, and our boat (home) sank. We decided this was God's way of confirming our decision to move ashore. We returned to Faial in May of 1996.

Our house and barn are stone buildings over 100 years old. We are expanding the barn to be our new house. The house (which has two rooms and a bathroom) will later be a guest house. During our land life we built one house from the ground up and enovated two. That was wood. This is concrete block, cement and bars of reinforcing steel. We are both having a wonderful time learning something entirely new: Tim, construction methods; me, quilting.

You wrote: Stick around for about eight years (when #3 is off to school) and I'll try to take you up on your offer.

There is no expiration date on the offer. :-)

Paula Colwell