My name is Mary Bartman my husband, Joe and I got the sailing itch about 9 years ago and we never looked back. It all started on a trip to the British Virgin Islands for our 25th anniversary in 2005.  We had booked a trip on a Windjammer Barefoot cruise for a week.  Standing on the bow one day Joe says," I always wanted to learn how to sail."  Well I never knew this in all the time we had been married.  So when we got home he started searching the internet and found a Colgate sailing course offered  at a sailboat show in Chicago so he signed us up.  Did I mention it was in January!  We go to this sailing class, a book learning course, later to be practically applied on a boat.  Joe was really soaking in all this information about points of sail and sheets and all that sailing jargon and I was sitting there lost.  I did get some of it but I have a little Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) if I sit too long, I started to space out during some of the course. After the class we wandered down to the boat show and started talking to people showing the boats.  We stopped by one place and he asked us where we were from.  Well we live in central Illinois not much sailing activity goes on here.  He suggested we check out a sailing club in Carlyle Illinois that has an open house every year in June.  We kind of looked around for a boat once in a while during the winter.  In the spring we got our 15 foot power boat out did the Illinois river a couple of times.  When June came we headed to Carlyle lake with our camping gear for this open house.  We get to Carlyle Sailing Association and sign in for our free sailboat ride.  Everyone was so friendly and nice and we just kept getting on different boats all day long.  Had some lunch with some wonderful people and had a great time.  We see that they are offering a sailing course on boats the next week so  Joe signs us up. 
We come down the next week take the sailing course for 3 days, now some of that book stuff we learned in Chicago starts to make sense.  By the 3rd day we were jibing and tacking and I actually was having fun until I forgot to duck and got hit in head with the boom twice.  Well my instructor Bill Clark asked me if I was O.K. and I was crying because it hit me just right on the head and made me cry.  I think Bill probably thought  this one is never going to come back sailing. And my ADD had kicked in too.  We went home after 3 days of sailing had some relatives in town for the week so we took them down to the river on our power boat. Skiing and tubing we had a lot of fun.  When we got back to the house we looked at each other and said man that was noisy not like sailing.  The very next day we put the power boat up for sale, sold it to the guy across the street from us two days later and starts searching for our first sailboat.