Something You Probably Didn’t Know

Monday May 12, 2014


You don’t usually meet people who give their houses names but when your home is a sailboat it is quite different. I have been living aboard Splendid Isolation for three years. Michael and I bought her from Taylor when I was 19. I am now 22 years old. When people ask why I decided to move onto a sailboat I am not sure how to answer them still after all this time I don’t know what to say. I never thought it would happen. It wasn’t exactly planned early on. I had never even sailed before in my life! When we first met Taylor it was obvious to me that he loved the boat. You could see it in his eyes. He was passionate for her. It was his place. You know the one you go to to be you. Escape judgement and “real life” Walking inside the cabin for the first time you could feel the warmth. We didn’t have to do much to make if feel like we were at home. Taylor had already done this for us. He gave us our first sailing lesson and really the only one we ever had. When Splendid Isolation became ours I had never intended on living aboard. I was planning on getting my own apartment. Obviously this changed for I quickly realized how special the boat was to Taylor and how much he had loved having it. I wanted to put my things everywhere. I loved to sit in the cockpit in the morning and even more than that moving onto the sailboat had changed Michael. He was letting himself relax and dreaming of all these places we were going to go to. I loved him so much I think I would have moved onto a kayak at that point. I wanted to share with you something Taylor wrote me when I asked why he named our home Splendid Isolation. I wanted to be able to share this with all of you. I knew of the song by Warren Zevon. Briefly meeting Taylor a free spirit and talented artist I knew there was more to the story. Everyone always asks what is the name of your boat? Why? Did you name it that? Don’t you always want to have a story to tell? Well I do. Meeting Taylor Zepeda was the beginning of a beautiful story that changed my life. Maybe one day all write it all down on paper. Try to understand how much love has gone into our home.

Taylor Zepeda tells you a little about Splendid Isolation…

” When I bought the boat from Clyde it was called Fellowship. But the name was covered up by the outboard mount. So when i came to painting it, I didn’t feel bad about changing the name.
At the time I was supper into Warren Zevon and My favorite song was Splendid Isolation.
Zevon got that song title from a term coined about England in the late 1800’s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendid_isolationWiki page gets in more detail but it was basically about how England kinda annexed themselves from the rest of Europe at the time and were happy to do so. “

” The font that I used for the name was based off Ralph Steadman’s art from Hunter S. Thompson books and articles. HST and Zevon were friends too. They even wrote a song together. Freedonia is a Marx Brothers reference from their movie Duck Soup. Its the made up country in the movie. “
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedonia

” When I was younger one of my first jobs was on a harbor tour boat around Long Beach and San Pedro. One of the captains that I worked with would always say that the home port of some of the but tanker was Freedonia. nobody understood the reference and it amused him. he was kinda like walter mathau mixed with homer simpson and always played pranks and would recite bad jokes over and over. Freedonia was put on the back of the boat as an homage to him. “