A summary of our August adventures, including a visit to the sail loft, financial discussions, new brake pads, Milky Way photography, stuff breaking on the boat, and Boone Hall Plantation!

I got my annual bonus on August 3, which happened to also be the day we could leave work early enough to make it to the Quantum sail loft before they closed. We fully expected that my bonus would go straight into buying new sails.

However, the guys at the loft kept repeating our boat’s mantra: “it’s in surprisingly good shape for its age!” and instead quoted us a few hours of repair time for the main, the sail cover, and the genoa. The spinnaker was like new, they said, although we needed a new sock for it. I could have jumped for joy, instead of a ~12k replacement expense, they quoted us about ~2k in repairs / new sock.

The only disappointing thing was the spinnaker – normally these are fun, bright colors, typically the most beautiful sail on a boat. We’d never had ours out so I was excited to see what it looked like. Well, some genius in our boat’s past thought it would be fun to put a graphic of a sailboat sailing on our sailboat’s sail. Spectacular creativity there. And what’s worse, it was a little wet, and the colors had leeched all over the sail. We may be able to clean it up with a little diluted bleach. Fortunately we stopped by late on a Friday, so they left the spinnaker out all weekend to dry.

We left the loft a little early to head downtown to First Friday, so instead we stopped at Frothy Beard Brewing to celebrate the good news on the sails. We had been planning to sit down and have a finance / timeline discussion as soon as we knew how much my bonus would be, and how much the sails would cost. We are both salary, so now that those big questions are answered, we know exactly how much income we’ll have before we quit our jobs.

Essentially, we know we both have to work through September in order to reach our financial goals, and then I needed to work at least through Oct 1^st for reasons related to health insurance and vacation pay. Kyle is standing in a wedding on the 13^th in MN, and we have Charleston friends getting married on the 20^th. We need at least a week to move the boat up to NC, where we’ll stay at a marina for the refit portion, before heading south to the Bahamas after hurricane season. That left us with two windows to move the boat to NC: either we do it before Kyle flies to MN (ie the first week of October) otherwise we’d have to wait until after the 20^th and move it then. If we chose the first option, I’d pretty much work my last day, then we’d leave the following day – a tight schedule. If we took the second option, we’d work until maybe the 11^th, then Kyle would fly out for a weekend, then we’d have a week to prepare for our trip. The second option was looking pretty good, so that’s what we decided on.

We felt good about that plan, so we went downtown and enjoyed wandering from gallery to gallery. First Fridays in Charleston is our favorite date night, it’s free (if you know where to park), we can explore beautiful downtown Charleston, and we get to check out local artists while enjoying wine and cheese.

The car needed new brake pads, so the following weekend Kyle got up early to get those done before it got too hot. He was also threatening to put up the bus awning – we bought an awning this spring but still haven’t tried it out yet. I didn’t want to miss that so I went with him to the parking lot.

The awning is huge. Big enough to put a Honda Fit under, but there’s nothing a Fit can’t do. This car has been so great – the interior space is huge, the mileage is great, and it’s still small enough to be a fantastic city car. The only time we wish for something else is when we’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic and get leg cramps from shifting so much.

That night was supposed to be one of the best nights to see the Perseid meteor shower. We had planned on camping a couple hours away from the Charleston city lights, but the forecast was iffy so we opted to stay closer to home. We headed out to Folly Beach in the bus, intending to either go home after the meteor shower, or stay so late that we’d just sleep in the bus. As Kyle was emptying out a cabinet, he found a jug of distilled water had gotten crushed and the bottom of one of our cabinets was ruined. Oh well, this flooring is total crap anyway.

We stayed at the beach until about midnight. We only saw a few meteors, and it started to cloud up so we called it a night. While the meteors were underwhelming, we did get a great view of the Milky Way and Mars. I tried out night photography for the first time. I seriously love my new camera and this wide angle lens.

A big wind storm made me put my foot down on the anemometer thing, I hate not knowing what the windspeed is because I want to get a feel for what sailable winds are like. Kyle started checking the electronics at the helm, the short version of this story is that we need to go up the mast, get the transducer, then send it in to Raymarine for repair. So that project will have to wait until refit.

I got out a pint of ice cream and it was total soup, which is how we found out the freezer fan had stopped working. Kyle rigged up two small computer fans to keep it running while he waited for his Amazon order to arrive. It is barely more expensive to order 5 fans instead of one, so he keeps ordering large quantities of computer fans. We’ve put some in the inverter locker, and we have enough now to add them wherever we want.

The bilge alarm went off unexpectedly (the AC drains into the bilge, so it does come on occasionally), and that’s when we found a leak in one of the water tanks. The previous owners (bless their hearts) and drilled a hole into the vent line for the water tank, and had added a line from the watermaker to the vent line. Instead of using a proper fitting, they’d just gooped the whole thing up with silicone. That was no longer holding. Add it to the list.

We had too many working weekends, and our time in Charleston is dwindling, so I planned a fun day for us. We started out at Boone Hall Plantation, which is the only plantation we haven’t been to yet. We tried to get there earlier but had a couple stops to make along the way. I was extremely pleased to find that their avenue of oaks was driveable – other plantations have similar features but they are only accessible on foot (which makes them great for scenic wedding locations).

I took tons of photos, it’s hard to pick out just a couple to post here.

We had some miscommunication on packing up food for a picnic lunch, so instead we stopped at Aldi to pick up some snacks. The bus has an issue with clogged fuel lines, there’s something in the tank that causes the lines to clog but we need to remove the gas tank to empty it out, and that requires removing the engine. That will be another project for NC.

After that we headed to Shem Creek for a picnic lunch. We used to go there frequently and picnic, but it’s been quite a while since our last visit. It’s a really nice spot.

I participated in a Refinery29-style money diary challenge to write up my weekly spending, I’ve reposted that here. It’s a pretty accurate picture of our weekly routine, and how we spend money.