By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
October 3, 1999
Allison Ellis never imagined that she would be keeping house . . . on a boat. Then she met Gregg Collins at a Web development company in Seattle where they both worked.
It started out slowly enough almost four years ago. He had just bought a sailboat – an old, wooden 1954 classic. Would she like to spend the day sailing with him?
“I had grown up around the water,” Ellis, 29, recalls. “I swam, was on the crew team and had learned how to sail as a kid. So I thought it would be fun.
“We did some sailing – just the two of us – and had a great time. I thought, `This is so romantic – even just the smell of the boat was romantic to me. I fell in love with him and with the idea of what our life would be like together.”
During one of their late-night conversations, she asked Gregg, “What’s your ultimate dream?
Gregg, now 35, told her, “I want to sail to the South Pacific.”
This is where Allison sighed and packed her sarong and flip-flops, right?
“No,” Allison says, laughing. “I said, `You have got to be kidding! People don’t do that in small boats. They do that on a cruise ship.’ He was talking Christopher Columbus kind of stuff.”
He wooed her. He brought out a bunch of sailing magazines and gave her a book about an 18-year-old woman with no previous sailing experience who navigated around the world solo.
Suddenly, the idea didn’t sound so implausible to her.
They went shopping for a bigger boat.
“Gregg’s boat was 36 square feet, and we wanted something bigger with some headroom,” she says. “So we searched and found this perfect boat. When we stood in it, it was just kind of a surreal experience. We fell in love with it and knew that we had to buy it.”
It wasn’t completely perfect. It was only 26 feet – 10 feet smaller than Gregg’s bachelor boat. And it didn’t have a toilet. (“On small boats, the first thing you smell is the head,” Allison says. “I didn’t want to smell that.”)
They got engaged in June 1996. One year later, they were married. On the registry: dry goods and sailing equipment rather than china and linen.
They never made it to the South Pacific, but they did live on their docked boat before moving to Chicago last year.
Old habits die hard. The couple still enjoy sailing together, but they left their boat in Seattle and moved into a land-lubbing apartment.
Their first rental on Lake Shore Drive was just 350 square feet.
Now, they live in a space three times as large.
And they like it that way.
