Hello everyone and welcome to our first blog update of 2016. Happy New Year!
It was a busy holiday season for Raquel, Brian & Shiloh. Our goal was to move out of our house in Atlanta by Thanksgiving and we barely made it. We hosted a going away party, then had a garage sale where we sold 75% of our furniture and donated a lot of the remaining household goods and clothes in late November. We had a fun short visit with the Liddy family in Tennessee and then returned to the house to finish moving stuff into storage and getting the house ready to rent. Thanks to Claire, Vince, Brad, Heidi, Chad, Matt, Miles, Roger, Mike, Alysa and all our Roseclair neighbors for helping us move. After 9 years in the same house, de-cluttering, purging and cleaning was a little overwhelming especially since we tried to do it without hiring professional movers and made 10+ separate trips using a small trailer and the 4Runner to the Storage Unit in Marietta. On our last visit we realized our unit was 12 inches too short to house the 1972 Mustang (we had rented a 30’ unit but had to move to a 25’ unit since the lip on the entrance would bottom out the car) so our friend Derek Brown is keeping it safe until hopefully it sells.
Oh, and we also got engaged in November! No firm wedding plans set yet but hoping for something in the fall of 2016 in Austin, Texas as well as possible receptions in Atlanta and Tennessee.
We drove our other two cars to Tampa the first week of December. Our sailboat Serendipity had spent a month on the “hard” getting a keel crack fixed, the bottom painted, new standing rigging, new VHF antenna, new depth transducer, new batteries, steaming/deck and anchor lights.
<------(Brian inspects the keel crack repair and new bottom job at the boat yard)
<------------------(Serendipity is splashed after being on the hard for the month of November - putting the mast back up)
We may write a separate blog about all the other boat fixes/upgrades but basically within 24hrs of arriving in Tampa we didn’t have a place to sleep and we had to write a $10K check to get the boat out of the yard, which was probably $4-5K more than originally estimated or expected. Luckily we had a great experience with AirBnB. (our first time with them too!)
We had another 20 something To-dos to complete before we could go cruising, including buying a new dinghy/motor, installing an electrical windlass, new holding and fuel tanks, a new AIS/VHF receiver, windex, and much much more...
Our friends Neil and Janet Davies, who went cruising to the Bahamas in 2014, have been our inspiration and mentors and have given us lots of advice. While Neil moved his 43’ Hunter sailboat Midnight Sun II from his slip just next to us on P Dock at Lake Lanier in December and was able to start his cruise less than a month later, he later told me he had spent 2 years getting to know his boat systems and upgrading his electronics and fixing a lot of nagging issues in preparation for their 6 month cruise to the Bahamas. Luckily they invited Brian to spend 3 weeks on their boat to assist in crossing the Gulf Stream and cruise the Abacos Islands in the Bahamas. Raquel joined the crew for a week at Treasure Bay and we got a small glimpse of the cruising lifestyle realizing then it was the type of vacation we would want to do again soon.
<---------------(Shiloh waits for Brian on his first day at the marina)
Brian had spent only two - 10 day visits in Tampa in September and October prepping Serendipity before it was hauled for bottom job repairs. While he replaced the fuel injectors on the 27 HP Yanmar 3 cylinder engine as well as the mixing elbow, and replacing fuel/oil filters, oil, coolant, etc. all these dozen or so minor repairs to the engine and electronics with the help of fellow sailor and master electrician Steve Sohn, this was just not enough time to get the boat ready to start cruising in 2015.
<------------(Our home for the next month or so....The Yacht Club clubhouse in the distance)
(Houston, we need a bigger black water holding tank - this is 10 gal, original was 20 gallon - this fills up in 48 hours while in a marina and must be pumped out - look for future update on the SMELL War of which there have been dozens of battles won and lost)------------------------------------>
Brian’s brother John and his family were to meet us in Key West for NYE but fortunately he booked refundable flights. Ironically they are now on a cruise to Mexico/Belize which might be ultimately cheaper. We made our plans to meet the Ojedas in Naples on Christmas, but drove our car instead of the boat.
We have been sailing in Tampa bay on the weekends, testing/tuning the rigging with our friends AJ, Josh & Emily and Mark & Kat Ojeda and their kids Henry & Molly. Serendipity sails well and is fast even in light breeze. The bay is treacherous with underwater rocks, broken pilings, wrecks and lots of sandbars less at than 2 feet at low tide. We draw 4.5 feet with our wing keel and our marina is well north in the bay several miles up a commercial shipping channel. We’ve already had to dodge freighters under sail where the channel narrows with shallows on either side which is a little more stressful sailing than when we were on the lake.
<-------(AJ & Brian after sailing at our favorite local restaurant Hula Bay, which is about 500 yards from our slip)
We definitely miss our mainsail stackpack and lazy jacks as the dutchman system isn’t working as well as it should....every time we sail we say “add it to the list” of something we want to change or upgrade.
Our marina Westshore Yacht Club is very beautiful and a little high class. They decorated the Palm trees and Club house with beautiful Christmas lights. Luckily we are on floating docks but we have to keep Shiloh on leash to walk him about 300 yards each trip for him to do his business. We’re all fortunate that there is a big green space very close in the posh neighborhood plus a dog park about a quarter mile away within the gated community.
<----There’s also a dog beach at Picnic Park about 2 miles away. It has been difficult for him since when he’s on the boat there’s hardly any room for him to walk around so we try to get him (and us) some exercise, even playing chuck it on the hurricane concrete seawall. Keeping him washed and groomed is also a high priority to keep the boat smelling fresh too.
The idea that Raquel and our dog Shiloh could acclimate to the boat in a few weeks and everything be ready for immediate cruising in December was really naive.
Raquel makes trips to the laundry once a week to get some alone time and use their Wifi. We are not sure what is worse, a marina with weak Wifi or no Wifi. With about 30-40 items to purchase for the boat, it makes it hard to shop online for sure.
One serendipitous item was that after one day on the boat the St. Pete boatshow started and we conveniently---> received free tickets from our chandlery vendor Island Nautical. There were dozens of seminars called “First Time Cruising” or “Cruising the Bahamas” or “Docking and Anchoring for Two” that were perfect for both of us to witness to learn from some professional sailors and prepare us for the trip. We spent two days heads down attending these very educational instructional type classes taking dozens of pages of notes, realizing what a daunting amount of preparation is required for this trip we are about to undertake. Funny thing is we only spent about 20 minutes touring the new sailboats as it just wasn’t even practical to look at a new boat when we already have a “new” sailboat to us even though it is 20 years old.
Our nightly routine is to watch the sunset from our stern perch seats behind the cockpit, but more to keep the flock of about 10,000 blackbirds or fish crows from landing on our mast every evening when they return to the little island just northwest of the marina. The surreal swirling of so many birds makes the Hitchcock movie “The Birds” look like a kindergarten play. We strum the backstay or fire of a pop gun because their bombs of purple berry shit really stains the deck. One highlight is that when hundreds of birds flap their wings only a few dozen feet overhead you can hear it vibrate in the wind in a way never experienced before.....the murmur movement is like starlings and makes the sunsets even more memorable.
The high temperatures have been in the mid to upper 80s with high humidity, setting record highs for Tampa 8 days in a row in late December. Thank goodness the air conditioning on the boat works, as well as the refrigerator, but it makes us wonder what we’ll do once we plan on being at anchor more nights than not....We hope to anchor out a few times over the next couple of weekends once the windlass is installed and give Raquel some more practice steering the boat.
So we will take a few more weeks to finish repairs and upgrades and see when we can leave to cruise the "Suncoast" down to Sarasota then Ft Meyers and eventually Naples, Marco Island and the Keys.
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