Our marina woes aren’t over. We’re still asking questions like “where are we going to live next week?” which is really testing the limits of my serenity. I know only one thing for certain: no Charleston marina wants liveaboards.

Here are our options:

• We’re currently #1 on the waiting list for the Winter Special at the downtown marina. We’d LOVE to live downtown Charleston, plus this locks us in to a longer term slip (Dec-Apr).
• If that doesn’t work out, we also know a guy renting private slips at the downtown marina. The problem is the availability is only through February. Technically we’re not allowed to liveaboard in this slip and oops! It’s also right next to the marina office so we risk getting kicked out. Since we’re so new to all of this, I really can’t assess the risk level of this option.
• Stay where we are. It’s cheap, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. Also we’d have stay on a month-to-month basis instead of locking in a longer-term spot / rate.

For now, our plan is to stay at Cooper for another month. Hopefully a Winter Special slip will open up, and we can move over there. If not, when our month is up we will see if the private slip is still available. If not…I guess we’ll have to look at what options are available.

I wouldn’t call this stressful, but it’s a very unsettled feeling. I’m sure it will get easier as we gain more experience with marina etiquette. I’m hoping we won’t have to juggle our options monthly like this. Theoretically there should be a transient slip available somewhere every month. This is who we are now.

On Friday we drove the bus to work, then as soon as I got out on Friday we headed straight to the campground. The weekend before Thanksgiving is always our bus club Thanksgiving Misgivings campout, and it’s my favorite campout of the year. It’s small – there were ten buses this year – which means it’s intimate enough that I have time to have a good conversation with everyone that attends.

Since living on the boat feels very similar to camping, it wasn’t much of a transition to spend the weekend in the bus. The weather was perfect, the crowd was delightful, the food was delicious, and the campfire was warm.

We spent a lot of time answering questions about the boat this weekend, I figured the bus club would get a kick out of it since they’re already well-practiced at tiny living. They also have a better appreciation for eco-friendly living. One of the reasons I love Cooper River Marina is that they’re owned by the local Parks Dept, huge advocates of recycling. Our local dump had stopped recycling anything, so we’re getting back in the habit of separating our garbage because now we can recycle 90% of it!

I’ve been watching camera prices for the past year, and the camera and lenses I want both went on sale this week – I assume it’s a precursor to Black Friday sales – so today I pulled the trigger and ordered $1000 in camera gear. Kyle’s got his eye on a drill set so it looks like we’ll be going shopping on Black Friday for the first time in probably ten years. Between the list of boat projects and our wishlists, we’ve got no shortage of things to spend money on lately. It feels strange because we’ve lived so frugally for so long. We’re still being frugal, but our monthly spending was on track to be a record low and now current forecasts are projecting us to end close to 50% above average. At least we’ll have some fun new toys to play with.