We’re almost packed up and we’re definitely ready to move out. The last week or so has been extremely difficult, a mix of depression and frustration and mutual problems. We’re upset that we’re still here, but our project list still feels so long. We’re working hard, we’ve accomplished a lot, but we’re now so late in the season that our cruising options are getting limited (ie we don’t have enough time left in the season to make it to here or there before hurricane season).

I haven’t been writing regularly because it’s hard to write when everything feels like crap and my time has been better spent being productive elsewhere. However, we’re down to our final hours here. We planned to leave Sunday (yesterday) but we probably would have stayed up til midnight on Saturday working our asses off, and exhaustion is not great way to begin a trip. Also the weather looks more favorable for crossing the big bodies of water (Albemarle Sound, Neuse River) if we leave Wednesday.

We’ll head down to Charleston, where we need to get hauled out for a bottom paint job. We also need to have a survey done – when we initially bought the boat, we bought a current survey from a previous group of buyers so we could save some money. What we’ve found since then is that insurance companies don’t know how to handle a survey that does not have the owners name on it. It’s total BS, of course, the survey is for the boat and has nothing to do with the owner, but insurance is shrouded in mystery and mounds of paperwork. Learn from our experience: if you’re pretty sure you’re going to buy the boat, have your own survey done. If you buy the boat you’ll have to do it anyway.

Since we arrived in October, here’s what we’ve gotten done (get some popcorn and buckle in, you’re going to be here awhile):

• Kyle was in a wedding in Minneapolis (I finally saw a photo, so I know he wasn’t lying – but it seriously took about three months before he could prove he was actually in a wedding)
• We traveled to Charleston for a bus club wedding
• Edited all the photos from that, made a photobook!
• Pulled the engine out of the bus
• Cleaned out the bus’ gas tank
• Put the engine back together, leave on a giant road trip the next day
• Drove 1500 miles, including the first snowstorm of the season
• Visited all our parents and a few friends/family
• Put the bus in storage
• Cut out the salon table, grind down the fiberglass stump. Replace with coffee table
• Replace the kitchen sinks
• Open up the kitchen storage openings and move an outlet
• Pumped out the full bow lockers
• Put together our First Aid Kit
• Had a welder come out and fix our davits as well as add bracing to the bimini superstructure
• Find a leak that caused the water pump to run every couple hours, I’m pretty sure it was even more frequent at night when I was trying to sleep, but it was fixed by tightening a hose clamp so I guess I’m not too mad about it
• Design and order a boat stamp – for under $20!

• Sand and refinish all cabinet doors
• Re-bed two cabinet door frames
• Replace two diesel shut-off valves (technically Kyle’s dad did this)
• Figure out how the watermaker works, test it, turn nasty canal water into water that tastes like…absolutely nothing! Nothing at all!
• Test the generator
• Replace a water line that runs in between water tanks, it was leaking
• Pull all anchor chain off boat, measure, load back onto the boat
• Rewire all speakers, add an amp to the stereo. Only 3 out of 6 speakers work currently. *Slaps forehead repeatedly*
• Replace the compass
• Learn how to do gelcoat repair and practice on a small area hidden under the new compass – it doesn’t look awful but I’m glad the new compass covers it up
• Take the dinghy engine off its mount on the davits (it was corroded and took four days to remove)
• Have a technician look at the engine, take it apart, clean the carburetor, replace the spark plugs, etc. Order spares based on his recommendations
• Test the dinghy engine
• Put the dinghy engine on the dinghy and go for a ride. Both times we tried that we ended up rowing home.
• Diagnose dinghy engine problems: it was overheating because the old impeller had lost all six of its fins. Kyle and Gage had a lot of trouble getting it apart to get to the impeller, I was out running errands so I missed all the fun.

• Oh yeah, and we have a secondary dinghy engine. Gage also replaced the one spark plug in that, it ran fine first try. 2 hp though, I bet I could paddle faster than that!
• Design and build a hard top (plus the countless hours of thinking and planning and re-designing)
• Take apart the mast winch, which had seized up when we were putting the genoa back up
• Find part of a stamped plate in the winch had sheared off, spend several days looking for a replacement
• Can’t find a replacement, decide to see if we can get them welded
• Look at the rest of the winch plates (we have five total), find that two are nearly sheared off and the other two are showing signs of stress
• Bring all to welder – he completed the welding on Friday! I put the winches back together this weekend
• Design solar panel mounts at least three times, finalize design. Mount and wire up solar panels
• Figure out how to use old windshield with new hard top. Spoiler alert, I had to hand-sew a seam the length of the windshield. My nightmare! At least the cat kept me company. That cat is a jackass, except during the holiday shutdown he was very affectionate. A Christmas miracle!

• Detail and sell the Honda Fitty Fit Fit (*sobs internally*)
• Buy a new grill / smoker. Learn how to use it. Smoke all the things!
• Re-bed sliding door track
• Empty diesel tanks, add fuel back 5 gallons at a time and test our tank gauges (yeah…they don’t work), plus make our own stick gauge, find out the true capacity of our tanks
• The day before we were going to leave, the fridge wasn’t working right. So we had to quickly defrost the fridge. Thankfully that fixed it. I don’t know if we could have left with a defunct fridge.
• Test the wind generator. It wasn’t working, Kyle took it apart and found a bent shaft – that’s beyond our DIY abilities and we will send it to the manufacturer for repair.
• Test a used wind generator. Order a new blade for it. Get it ready for mounting, fully wired up, only to find out that the mounting tube is a hair too small for it to fit. Will have to finish that one later.

• Change oil in both engines
• Replace water pump in starboard engine
• Go through both engines with an expert (Kyle’s dad), order spares based on recommendations
• Learn how to make bread in a slow cooker
• Research offshore weather forecasting, eventually decide on IridiumGo & PredictWind. We still need to receive these so we can start playing around.
• Replace trampolines, including new hooks and line

• Bought all new running rigging (so far we’ve only replaced the spinnaker line, all the current lines are functional but nearing the end of their lifespans)
• Move and re-secure batteries
• Buy new (used) radar dome. Take down old dome, find out we’ll need to make a new bracket to fit the new one.
• Make bracket
• Mount new radar dome – this involved me sitting on the main sail and lifting it up to Kyle, on a really gusty day. Spoiler alert: neither of us dropped it.
• Add new spreader lights (technically they are on the radar bracket, not the spreaders)

• Add foam mattress topper and protective mattress cover to master suite
• Test out LED cockpit lighting, still need to permanently install
• Just yesterday I realized that the keel strip, an impact strip on the bottom of our dinghy, was missing, so I ordered a new one. It might have fallen off when the dinghy was in the shop? But it looks like it broke, so even if we found the old one it’s probably trash. Still, wtf.
• Empty everything out of the boat, go through it, get rid of a lot of stuff
• Re-organize everything, put back on boat
• Buy a million things we didn’t know we needed, like binoculars, tablets, a spotlight, a vacuum sealer, like $500 worth of wire, almost $1000 worth of spares, his-and-hers harnesses plus climbing rope and carabiners, a handheld VHF, I think we still need to figure out a handheld GPS unit.
• And really, this is the killer: all the research. We are thorough people, we don’t buy things on a whim, so our purchases were well-researched, mulled over, and reconsidered. Any project we completed was thought about, then talked over, then thought about some more, then one of us would find some new detail, then we’d start the process over. It’s exhausting.
• Plus a million little things that Kyle did when I wasn’t looking. He’s always tinkering with something. I probably missed 38 little electrical projects that he completed. And a million little things I did on social media when Kyle wasn’t looking. It takes up a significant portion of time.

On top of this, all the normal household things like making food, doing laundry, making sure bills get, paid, etc! I think we only went out to eat two or three times since arriving home after Thanksgiving, we made almost all of our meals since then. Oh, and any errands were at least an hour away so those ate up a lot of time too.

In retrospect it’s pretty obvious that we were too thorough, we’re cautious people and it’s really showing. We did too much. But on the plus side, there isn’t a system on this boat that we haven’t touched in some way, either a full overhaul or a quick fix.

Writing this all out now, I feel slightly ashamed, like what on earth were we thinking. Part of the inertia to stay put is that we can currently get parts and advice for very cheap, and once we leave here it’s going to be hard to get parts – especially since we won’t have an address to ship them to. We’ve been trying to make sure that we buy anything we need now. We’re incredibly grateful to Kyle’s family for all the advantages they’ve given us while we’ve been here. We would have struggled so much more with the dinghy engine if we’d had to tackle it on our own – it would have been a nightmare. We’ve saved so much money through their discounts, that’s been a huge benefit. And having easy access to a shop full of all the tools we could ever need – unbeatable!

Another part of it was poor planning – if we’d left on December 15, the original plan, we’d have arrived at the boat yard for haul-out just as they shut down for the holidays. Ideally we’d have left around Christmas day so we’d have arrived at the boat yard just as they re-opened, but by then we were stuck waiting on the welder to re-open and fix our winch plate situation. It was a self-perpetuating mess.

We’re so stoked to be on the move again. We have a loose plan for getting south, but 100% of our focus has been on getting ready to go. We’ll figure the rest out on the way.