We are rounding third and headed for home!

Happy New Year to all! Although 2021 has started with a bang, I have the sense that most folks are starting the year with great hope for the future. Ed and I are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of our hard work, and we are ready to embrace our new chapter with open arms! We have finished our house, and it is going on the market tomorrow! Below are some pictures of our home which has been a labor of love for the past few years:

We love our beautiful home, but it is time to close this chapter and move on to the next!

We have set our move out date for January 25th, which is a week and a half from now. We have been busy packing up the rest of our belongings which get designated in five different categories:

1. Items that stay with the house–we have elected to sell our house furnished since many of the furniture items that are left were chosen specifically for the space, where ever we live next will be smaller, and it may be a long time before we live back on land. It’s just not worth the cost to store furniture, most of which we likely would not be able to use in the future anyway.
2. Items that come with us to the boat–this category is fairly small since we have most of what we need on the boat already. This is mostly health/hygiene items, personal documents, clothing, shelf stable food/ingredients, some tools, and some of my kitchen wares.
3. Items we are keeping in storage–we have done a really good job of keeping this category small as well. These mostly include photographs, sentimental items, documents and paperwork we need to keep, dishes and a few other kitchen items I want to keep for later, and a couple of small furniture items that have sentimental value to me. We may find that some of our sentimental items are not as sentimental as time passes on, but we are all human and doing a 100% clean sweep of unnecessaries is a level of harshness that not even I can stomach.
4. Items for donate–this has been our biggest category by far. We have lots of little things that have found their way into our house, and I’ve put most of it to good use over the years. Without a house, they are now unnecessary for us and need a new home. This category runs the gamut from certain winter clothes to various home décor items to specialty kitchen tools to gardening supplies. I’ve become a frequent flier at the goodwill donation center.
5. Items to throw out–ultimately not everything can be donated, so it goes into the trash. We are trying to keep this category as small as we can, but everything that doesn’t fit into the categories above goes to the landfill.

This is actually a really good method to periodically declutter your home, and even the kids can help. Ian actually enjoys the exercise on occasion. Getting clutter out of your life and living with only those items you find useful is a great stress reducer. Sometimes joy comes in realizing how little you can live with.

At sea, I learned how little a person needs, not how much.

Robin Lee Graham

With the house soon to be wrapped up, we have also arranged for our boat to be hauled out next week with some repairs accomplished. We’ve already got standing rigging replaced last month, but here’s what we have left to do before our next sail:

1. Install new solar panel arch with incorporated davits. We’ve already had it fabricated, but we can’t get the old davits off and new arch installed until we haul out.
2. Replace rudder bearings. Ours have a little too much play in them, and that is one part you do not want fail.
3. Replace existing fixed pitch props with feathering props. Less drag, more speed. Sign me up.
4. Service sail drives (the thingy between the engine and props). They need oil changes too, and these guys are due. We suspect one of them has a small leak so we need to get that addressed too.
5. Finish up installing electric winch conversion kits. Only one kit made it with us to the boat last time. Ed got one installed, but we need to do the second one and get the electrical squared away.
6. Redo some of the running rigging and get everything back to the helm. We rapidly realized that with just having the two of us on board most of the time, the more we can eliminate the need for someone to be on deck while underway, the safer.
7. Have a new helm enclosure made. The one that came with the boat has pretty well fallen apart, and we like staying dry while sailing if possible. Sometimes waves do find their way up to the helm.
8. Bottom job (no, not like that…get your mind out of the gutter). The bottom paint is chipping in a lot of places, so we are going to have it sanded down and new paint applied.

We think the work will take 2-3 weeks and then hopefully we will be on our way to our first stop: The Bahamas! I have to start looking at the logistics of getting there as it’s a little complicated with Covid.

Before we leave we will be taking some time to say farewell to family and friends in a Covid-conscious manner, and then we hit the road to drive to Florida to begin our new life on the sea! We will miss everyone here, but also looking forward to making new friends and having new experiences.

Bon Voyage!