A summary of our February adventures, including art galleries, jumping dolphins, mold everywhere, a gator sighting, and camping among palm trees.

If we’ve got nothing planned for the weekend, we’ve made a goal to do one fun thing so we don’t spend the whole weekend cooped up on the boat. This was the first weekend of the month, so we went downtown for First Fridays on Broad, when the art galleries stay open late and we can wander from gallery to gallery, sipping on wine and checking out the local artists. It is one of our favorite frugal date nights. It was a little chilly and not as many of the galleries were open, but downtown Charleston is such a scenic place to walk around.

On Saturday I put a load of laundry in and then sat down to get some computer work done while Kyle did boat stuff, which means cleaning. It’s impossible to keep the boat tidy right now. He pulled all our shoes out of a forward berth and found them covered in mold. Is this nature’s way of saying I own too many shoes? We have a dehumidifier but it doesn’t work well below 60° so…it’s not helping at all.

Then a marina neighbor invited us out for a sail so we dropped what we were doing and headed out into the harbor. It was almost perfect wind and sun, although by the time we were done I was cold to my core. Nothing hot tea couldn’t fix though.

Overnight, the wind picked up from the south, which is the side we have no protection from. Early afternoon it got ugly, whitecaps everywhere and a huge swell. We added more fenders and more lines and tied down everything that was flapping around too much. We had projects planned but we ended up just watching the waves roll through the marina as the wind howled through our rigging. The forecast was for 17kt sustained / 24kt gusts, it sounded like a lot higher than 17 knots but our anemometer doesn’t work. We later talked to a neighbor and she said they were seeing 38kt sustained winds, so now fixing the anemometer has moved up much higher on the to-do list.

Things weren’t exactly comfortable on Hobbes, but watching all the monohulls roll around in the swell looked much worse. I’m really pleased with how well this catamaran has handled any of the rougher weather we’ve been in.

One day while Kyle was away at the shower I saw several dolphins jumping fully out of the water. I’d never seen that before, and of course this cool thing was happening and Kyle wasn’t around to see it! I grabbed the zoom lens and tried to snap a couple shots so I could prove to him that it really happened.

The boat has been such a huge mess, I know I talk about it too much, but our schedule right now really only allows us to get a little work done on the weekends, and most of that is finding out where the mold has spread and cleaning it up. The mess at home was driving me so crazy that I cleaned my desk at work, just so I had one tidy space in my life. Yeah, it’s that bad.

BUT! Then! Kyle took a mental health day on Friday (which – don’t even get me started on how great these are – everyone should have the freedom to declare two or three “mental health” days every year where they get to stay home and work on all the things that are stressing them out) and he tidied up the boat. It was so great. It made me insanely happy. I can’t wait until jobs are no longer a factor in our day-to-day, so we can have a clean boat all the time.

Since the boat was already cleaned up, we got actual projects done over the weekend. Just little stuff, but enough to make us feel like we’re making progress.

We also stopped by our favorite thrift store and found a fender for $6. You can never have too many fenders, especially at that price. This was the best weekend we’ve had in a while, it’s amazing how much good weather and a clean boat improve my outlook on life.

Some friends and I went out to dinner the day before Valentine’s, and Kyle was excited to have a night to himself to watch some alien movie that I refuse to watch with him. We had a great time at dinner, it’s always so refreshing to get some girl time in. On the way home, I had to come to a full stop on the entrance road to the marina due to an alligator crossing – this was the day after Kyle had gone for his first (and last!) night run. We’d never seen any of the pond gators before, it’s a good thing I take photos or Kyle would never believe any of my wildlife sightings.

The next day, I had been planning a fancier homemade me for Kyle’s and my Valentine’s day, probably something with salmon. However, I chanced upon a recipe for homemade chicken nuggets and thought Kyle might enjoy that even more. I asked him to come up with a side and we decided some oven fries would be perfect.

Whilst I was flour-dredging and egg-washing our future nuggets, I told Kyle how excited I was about dinner – “such a treat! We literally NEVER have chicken nuggets like this, and they’re going to be so good!” when out of nowhere, he sheepishly admitted that while I was at dinner the night before he breaded up some chicken and pan-fried it. “But…at least, not with FRENCH FRIES, right?!” Oh no, he had baked himself some fries as well. I was trying to decide whether he’d ruined dinner, or if the whole situation was just hilarious. Apparently when I leave for a night he reverts back to his 14-year-old self.

The following weekend was a big bus club campout, we hadn’t planned on camping but a spot opened up Friday afternoon so when we got home from work we haphazardly packed up some things and carted stuff out to the bus. The bus is mostly a storage unit for us right now, so we had to move everything out of that before we could load it up with camping gear, but in short order we hit the road.

We couldn’t walk from one end of the campground to the other without getting stopped several times, because we knew so many people and buses there! Some of our Charleston friends had brought their new puppy along so I grabbed my camera for some puppy glamour shots.

After living in Michigan it feels so wrong to camp amongst palm trees, but this campground was full of them, and so close to the ocean that we could hear waves crashing against shore all night long.

We sat down and had a discussion about boat projects this month. We’ve got a list a mile long and we’re making no progress on it, anticipating most of the progress will be after we quit our jobs and have free time. Even so, we’re still going to have to pick the critical projects to get done before we go, otherwise we’ll never leave the dock. The big one we talked about this weekend is the bimini + solar power. Our bimini is fabric, and it doesn’t handle rain well. We’d like to install a hardtop and cover it with solar panels. We also should decide what kind of cockpit enclosure we’d like, because it will be easiest to do everything at once rather than try to retrofit an enclosure later.

We went to Harbor Freight and Kyle bought a bunch of new toys (buffer, oscillating tool) so we can start our boat buffing project, then afterwards met up with some friends at a brewery. A couple breweries later we were all back at the boat, showing off our new home.

The next day we were both worn out and didn’t get much done. Kyle was supposed to meet up with a guy to sell our folding bikes, but the guy was a no-show. I realized I still haven’t even tried them out yet so we went for a bike ride. I really want to like bike riding, I really do! But it’s just not for me. If I never go for another bike ride again I will die happy.

When you read it all at once like this it feels like it was a busy month, but after being cooped up during January’s snowstorm, we were really just trying to take advantage of having nice weather again.