We spent the summer touring around and meeting up with friends and family, and I received so many compliments on writing and photography – thank you all so much for reading! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate hearing that, because sometimes it feels like I’m writing into the void. Multiple times, I’ve lagged behind on blogging, but then heard from a reader and got inspired to put out a new blog post the next day! I’m mega-stoked that you’re enjoying the blog!

Our lifestyle is a little unconventional, and lately we’ve been fielding a lot of questions about it! For starters, I talked about our day-to-day living in Boat Life Basics, so that post will answer questions about power, water, laundry, etc. For a tour of our boat-home, please check out our Island Spirit 37 page!

Why don’t you start a youtube channel?

Oh gosh, where do I start!? I’m sure I’d enjoy taking videos, but the hours upon hours of editing sounds like a slow, painful way to die. It would be different if I could make a living wage from it, but between changes in youtube’s algorithm and sailing-channel market saturation, I don’t see that being viable. We made exactly one video, it was very basic, and that was the last time I opened the video editing software.

How did you learn to sail? Did you go to a sailing school or get your captain’s license?

Kyle’s been sailing since a young age, I learned in my 20s. Pretty much everything we know, we learned from experience (aka we learned the hard way!). We don’t have any certifications, and a captain’s license is only necessary if you’re taking on paying passengers.

How big is your boat? If you had to do it again, would you buy a bigger boat or a smaller boat?

Hobbes is 37’ long and 22’ wide. If feels like a really big boat, but a small home. We were drooling over a much larger catamaran down the dock from us, and later when we ran into the owners they gushed over OUR boat because “it’s small enough for two people to handle but still large enough to be comfortable!” Undoubtedly, if we went a few feet bigger (43’ is a very desirable size) it would be much more comfortable, but there’s a commensurate increase in price. So, this boat size is great for us!

My complaint is the engines. When we lost a prop, we could barely fight tidal currents on one 29 hp engine. Gimme more horses! If I knew then what I knew now, I would have prioritized more horsepower, even if it meant getting a power boat. For how much motoring vs. sailing we’ve done, I think costs would have about evened out (extra fuel costs vs. costs of maintaining sails and rigging). Sailing is hardly ever quiet, I’d prefer the extra speed and noise over ultra-slow passages that might be slightly quieter.

How does insurance work?

It’s a lot like car insurance, we choose what kind of coverage we want and pay a yearly fee. Well, not quite like car insurance, I’ve never had my agent call me up and say they’re dropping us because they’re no longer covering mid-size sedans. Which is what just happened to us with the boat – our insurance company is no longer covering sailing catamarans so they’re not renewing our policy!

When we first signed up, we had to tell insurance what our boating experience level was, and what area we planned on sailing. We obtained East Coast coverage, and right before we crossed to the Bahamas we had to pay a small fee to increase coverage for that area as well. Insurance dictates that we must be north of the FL/GA line for hurricane season (June 1 – Nov 1), and realistically they’re not the boss of us, but they can refuse any claims that we make if we were inside the hurricane zone during that timeframe. On a personal note, I would also like to avoid hurricanes.

How did you choose a marina for hurricane season?

That’s easy – Kyle’s dad and step-mom lease Cypress Cove Marina in North Carolina, and they have extensive boat repair available on-site through their Yacht Doc services. The marina is extremely well protected, and it’s far enough inland that being grazed by a hurricane means we experience wind speeds that are half of what the coast is seeing.

If we didn’t have this awesome resource available, we would have chosen to stay as far south as we could, prioritizing wind protection and economical cost.

Is sailing at night scary?

So far, sailing at night is even more calm and peaceful than sailing during the day, provided we did our due diligence with weather planning. I thought night sailing would be my least favorite part of sailing, but it’s been one of the better experiences. We’ve seen the Milky Way and bioluminescence, we’ve seen the moon light up dolphins swimming alongside the boat in the middle of the night. It’s beautiful.

But we’ve also learned some hard lessons about weather planning and what kind of seas are comfortable for us, and anything that is uncomfortable during the day is going to be about 10x worse at night. I’ve never been so happy to see the sun rise.

Do you have any advice for people who want to start full time cruising?

Yes I do, thank you for asking! After you’ve bought the perfect boat, and you’ve made a big list of things that you want to refit and upgrade and change, step back and take a deep breath. If you can, take your boat out and live and travel in it for a month or two before pouring refit money into it. You might find that this isn’t the ideal boat you thought it was, and you might have a better idea of the optimal type of vessel for your travel goals. We’ve encountered SO. MANY. PEOPLE. who bought the perfect boat and spent thousands of dollars on upgrades, only to find out that…this just isn’t working. Us included.

You can consume as many boat blogs as possible, the budget pages of every cruiser who posts them, you can fully believe you know what you’re in for. But it still doesn’t compare to the real experiences. Seeing someone else drop $1000 on a small boat part isn’t the same as pulling money out of your own bank account. Spending ten minutes reading someone’s blog post on a terrible two-day passage isn’t the same as being stuck in that miserable situation for hours. And seeing photos of sea turtles doesn’t hold a candle to being right there in the water as they swim around you!

What’s one thing you wish people knew about sailing?

It’s boring. It’s so boring. It’s insanely boring. We’re notably bad at getting anything done while underway, even motoring down the ICW. The ICW requires a lot of concentration, so we usually do two-hour shifts at the helm. Offshore we do three-hour shifts. So one person is driving, and the other person is learning how to play guitar, or making elaborate meals, or installing this new thing, or cleaning out a locker that’s disorganized or moldy! No, kidding, none of that ever happens. I’ve been able to edit photos, or occasionally write a blog post, but not consistently. Mostly I read, or hang out and chat with Kyle. For hours on end. Our go-to is to make up worse and worse portmanteaus until we’re so disgusted with our lack of wit that we have to stop talking for a while. Meals are simple, like pasta or sandwiches. All of this is especially true offshore, when pretty much any swell creates a surprising amount of movement, even when the waves are gentle rollers we still have productivity issues. Plus, offshore we can read while on shift at the helm, and there’s only so many hours of reading I can do in a day.

I doubt we’re the exception here, but no one wants to hear about how extremely boring passages can be. Even if the wind is inconsistent, we might adjust sail configurations once every two or three hours. At least when we catch a fish we have a little entertainment.

The alternative is for it to NOT be boring, and that’s probably not good either. Excitement is usually either expensive or scary!

Oh, you’re heading to [destination]? How long will it take you to get there?

This seems like such a simple question but it’s so hard to answer! If we’re on the east coast, and we’re near an inlet, and the weather looks good, we’ll try to jump offshore where we can travel for 24 hours a day, and we cover ground pretty quickly. Or we might wait a few days if we see a good weather window approaching. Or we don’t have good weather, and we stay “on the inside” (the ICW), which means we travel for 6-10 hours a day and it’s very slow going with bridges and currents. So the short answer might be “anywhere from two days to two weeks.”

Essentially, our movements are dictated by the weather. In addition, with a counter current we might be making 3 kts all day, but with some good wind and the Gulf Stream current we were making 9 kts!

In the Bahamas, we spent a lot of time sitting and waiting for good weather before hopping around. The longest we’ve waited for good weather was two weeks!

What was the best moment aboard so far?

Oh man, I have two moments. We had a really rough start to 2019, traveling daily in freezing temps with no way to heat the boat, then getting stuck in the boat yard for months and spending a million dollars, then when we finally started moving again we broke down and had to wait for parts. I thought we’d never see those teal waters I’ve been dreaming about. But then one day in Florida, we anchored in dark water near an inlet. The tide changed and water started rushing in. Suddenly we were surrounded by beautiful, clear, teal water. We jumped on the paddleboards, we jumped in the water, for the first time we were actually swimming around our boat and playing in the most beautiful water I’d ever seen!

A similar, but better, moment like that happened in the Bahamas. It was right after I got comfortable snorkeling, and it was such a hot day. I jumped in the water to wash up a little bit, but the water felt so good that I didn’t get out, and then Kyle jumped in. Eventually I grabbed my snorkeling gear and we just embraced it, we snorkeled around the boat and got the underwater camera out and had a really good time! It’s so beautiful in the Bahamas, the water is an unbelievable shade of blue and so clear! The ocean too, but it’s a shockingly deep shade of blue. It’s hard to go back to the dark, murky waters of the ICW after that.

So what’s your long-term plan?

Oh my gosh, I can’t even…we have a new plan every week! The only thing I can say for sure is that we’re going to hop on the boat and head for the Bahamas as soon as hurricane season is over.

More questions!?

Ask away! I’ll update this post as needed! As always, you can put in your email address and get teal tales delivered straight to your inbox, or you can follow us on Instagram for more photos!