Our Background

I (Luke) am originally from South Africa. I left home with the intention to travel the world on yachts pretty much indefinitely. Lana is originally from the Seattle area and she happened to also leave home to travel the world on yachts but not with any particular time frame in mind.  We were fortunate enough to randomly end up being seated next to each other at a crew party at the local marina where our two yachts were docked. We were both working on luxury yachts getting paid to travel between Florida, Bahamas and the Caribbean. (Yeah, I know, it didn't suck!)

 

We hit it off immediately. We were engaged and married in under a year with delusions of an easy fun, party filled life ahead of us, what could go wrong , really? Working on yachts came with its challenges but it was an amazing experience.  Sadly the family we were working for, whom we love dearly still to this day, decided to sell their yacht. They had set the bar pretty high as far as yacht owners go and we did not think we would enjoy working for anyone else after that. We did try but our hunches were correct. The other yacht owners we worked for simply lacked the awesomeness we had experienced with our first family.

 

I had mentioned to Lana previously about wanting to open a bar so she suggested lets move back to Seattle and open a bar. We had no idea how we would pull that off but knew that if we never tried we would never succeed at all. Lana never spoke much about what the weather was like in the Seattle area and all I knew about Seattle was pretty much Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sound Garden came from here. So when we landed in Seattle on November 29th 2014 and it was dark by 4:30pm and snowing, well, needless to say, it was a learning curve adjusting to life in Washington after having been sailing between the Bahamas and the Caribbean and pretty much living in shorts and slops! We did end up opening our bar, The Underground Saloon, and we definitely had a few cocktails, but that is a story for another day! 

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