Taking possession was quite anticlimatic. Since we moved into an unfinished boat, our first night was nothing like the romantic and exciting start of a new life that we had envisioned. We had to load a ton of stuff (a minivan and a trailer to the brim), but there was no place to store anything. Not only the storage spaces were not finished, but the shelves and doors that would be part of them were on the beds and floors, interspersed with tools and rags, leaving very little space for anything else. On top of that, there was fiberglass dust everywhere. Not the most welcoming place. But fresh water flowed out of the faucets, propane flowed out of the stove burners, and the mattresses had been delivered earlier that day, so we could live in there.
After a few days floating tied to a mooring buoy, a more positive mood replaced the initial shock. Firstly, they may be slow to finish the boat, but we have full confidence in their workmanship, and the boat does look lovely if you ignore some details such as duct-taped plastic film in lieu of windows.
Secondly, things started to find their place, and now it takes me less than a minute to find my underwear. And, perhaps most importantly, the composting toilets do work as advertised!
We compiled a long list of things to fix and finish, only to learn that one of the key workers, the electrician, was at the hospital with a serious infection. We started to wonder whether we were the carriers of a nautical curse. A couple of years ago we owned a 1948 Folkboat, and we had hired a wooden boat expert to inspect our boat to give us a recommendation on a particular issue. He didn’t show up and then didn’t return our phone calls. When Kathy finally got hold of his assistant, she said that the reason he hadn’t returned our calls was because he died. Less than a year after that, I hired a diver to clean the boat’s bottom. He didn’t show up and didn’t return our phone calls. Appallingly enough, the story repeated itself almost exactly. So, after two unexpected, tragic deaths in our nautical record, the news were downright scary. Luckily, the electrician survived our curse and came back two weeks later. By then the list had grown to include a broken alternator bolt.
We got ourselves busy learning about the boat’s systems. We learnt, for instance, that the watermaker will actually consume your precious fresh water. Yup. Turns out that if you don’t use it for a few days (and we didn’t because the seawater in that little fishing harbor didn’t look clean enough), the watermaker will use 2 or 3 gallons of fresh water to flush the system and keep some obscure (and expensive) “membrane” from getting ruined. Now, of course, when the time for the flush came, there was no water left in the tank the watermaker is connected to. Actually, there was water, but it wouldn’t flow out of the tank because, as we learnt later, of a clogged vent. Clogged with, most ironically, fresh water. So there we were, manually moving water with the kettle from the tank in the other hull, to feed water to this fabulous gadget that was supposed to feed water to us.
Then one day something was suddenly amiss. My beloved dinghy, fruit of years of hard weekend labor, had just vanished! Panic ensued. And quite a bit of frustration given that I had just spent almost two full days installing a gunwale guard… to protect something that now was entirely lost. Without such an indispensable item the situation was disastrous, and, frankly, terribly embarrassing. Desperation turned into hope when we recognized a black, red and grey shape in a rocky beach in the island in front of us. It was there, waiting for us! We quickly donned our wetsuits and jumped into one sailboard each, and swam, paddled and kicked to the island. Gecko, the dinghy, somehow ended up magically cradled in a soft layer of seaweed, without even a scratch. What had happened was that each of us thought the other one was going to tie the dinghy, and neither of us did, nor double checked. To make matters worse, at that moment I did imagine a scenario where the dinghy would drift untethered, and figured I’d grab a sailboard to chase it, but even with that thought in my mind I didn’t bother checking the dinghy was secured. Lesson learned. Maybe.
All and all, there hasn’t been any time to relax yet, except for a little on-wheels cruising that we did with our daughters. To-do lists remain long, with forms to fill, manuals to read, spare parts to buy, things to organize, van and trailer to sell, gear to inspect, diesel engines to understand. We know that for the moment we are just experiencing most of the bad and few of the good things of cruising, but we also know the tide will eventually change. So, when we get overwhelmed we just have to take a deep breath and look outside to enjoy one of those good things: the landscape that surrounds us.
