{"id":113,"date":"2016-09-17T23:50:24","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T23:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/?p=113"},"modified":"2016-09-29T01:10:53","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T01:10:53","slug":"moving-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/2016\/09\/moving-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving in"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taking possession was quite anticlimatic. Since we\u00a0moved into an unfinished boat, our first night was nothing like\u00a0the romantic and exciting start of a new life that we had envisioned. We had to load a ton of stuff (a minivan\u00a0and a trailer to the brim), but there was no place to store anything. Not\u00a0only the storage spaces were not finished, but the shelves and doors that\u00a0would be part of them were on the beds and floors, interspersed with tools\u00a0and rags, leaving very little space for anything else. On top of that,\u00a0there was fiberglass dust everywhere. Not the most welcoming place. But\u00a0fresh water flowed out of the faucets, propane flowed out of the stove\u00a0burners, and the mattresses had been delivered earlier that day, so we could\u00a0live in there.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"g97et_09272\"<\/a>
\u00d1and\u00fa<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Secondly, things started to find their place, and now it takes me less than a\u00a0minute to find my underwear. And, perhaps most importantly, the composting\u00a0toilets do work as advertised!<\/p>\n

We compiled a long list of things to fix and finish, only to learn that one\u00a0of the key workers, the electrician, was at the hospital with a serious\u00a0infection. We started to wonder whether we were the carriers of a nautical\u00a0curse. A couple of years ago we owned a 1948 Folkboat, and we had hired a wooden\u00a0boat expert to inspect our boat to give us a recommendation on a particular\u00a0issue. He didn’t show up and then didn’t return our phone calls. When Kathy\u00a0finally got hold of his assistant, she said that the reason he hadn’t\u00a0returned our calls was because he died. Less than a year after that, I\u00a0hired a diver to clean the boat’s bottom. He didn’t show up and didn’t\u00a0return our phone calls. Appallingly enough, the story repeated itself\u00a0almost exactly. So, after two unexpected, tragic deaths in our\u00a0nautical record, the news were downright scary. Luckily, the electrician\u00a0survived our curse and came back two weeks later. By then the list had\u00a0grown to include a broken alternator bolt.<\/p>\n

We got ourselves busy learning about the boat’s systems. We learnt, for instance, that the watermaker will actually consume<\/em> your precious fresh\u00a0water. 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\u00a0that was supposed to feed water to us.<\/p>\n

\"Gecko,<\/a>
Gecko, the dinghy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then one day something was suddenly amiss. My beloved dinghy, fruit of years of hard\u00a0weekend labor, had just vanished! Panic ensued. And quite a bit of\u00a0frustration given that I had just spent almost two full days installing a\u00a0gunwale 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\u00a0a black, red and grey shape in a rocky beach in\u00a0the island in front of us. It was there, waiting for us! We quickly donned\u00a0our wetsuits and jumped into one sailboard each, and swam, paddled and kicked to the\u00a0island. Gecko, the dinghy, somehow ended up magically cradled in a soft\u00a0layer of seaweed, without even a scratch. What had happened was that each of us thought the other one was going to tie the\u00a0dinghy, 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\u00a0untethered, and figured I’d grab a sailboard to chase it, but even with that\u00a0thought in my mind I didn’t bother checking the dinghy was secured. Lesson\u00a0learned. Maybe.<\/p>\n

<\/a>All and all, there hasn’t been any time to relax yet, except for a little on-wheels cruising<\/a> that we did with our daughters.\u00a0To-do lists remain long,\u00a0with 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\u00a0good things of cruising, but we also know the tide will eventually change. So, when we get\u00a0overwhelmed we just have to take a deep breath and look outside to enjoy\u00a0one of those good things: the landscape that surrounds us.<\/p>\n

\"g91f6_09239\"<\/a>
Sunset<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"A<\/a>
A foggy dawn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"<\/a>
The mysterious beyond<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taking possession was quite anticlimatic. Since we\u00a0moved into an unfinished boat, our first night was nothing like\u00a0the romantic and exciting start of a new life that we had envisioned. We had to load a ton of stuff (a minivan\u00a0and a trailer to the brim), but there was no place to store anything. Not\u00a0only the storage … Continue reading “Moving in”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7GCAo-1P","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nandu.world\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}