The Great Wander

Last week, we had the electricians on board for one last time, maybe not quite the last time, but really close.  Our electrical panel is now all lit up at night, and we have a functional navigation station as well!  In fact we even started up the engines for the first time in seven months! That went reasonably well, one engine had a coolant leak, the other had a fuel leak, but changing a couple of fuel lines and tightening some bolts took care of both problems.  

There’s a couple of other things that need to be addressed, but nothing as major as what we have been doing.

As I look back on the last eight months, we’ve made some big improvements to the boat.

Engines

New engine mounts have been installed.  Fuel lines have been replaced. Coolant has been replaced.  I also understand how to remove the freshwater pump from the system as well.

Electrical

The whole electrical system has been replaced and in fact, now we know where every single wire goes on the boat.  We have also increased our amp hours in the battery bank, installed a new solar system, and have a solid charging system.  We also have all new LED navigation lights, which really are a reduction in the power draw.

Rigging

We’ve replaced the main halyard, the mainsheet and the traveler line.  

Anchoring

We’ve upgraded our anchor to a Rocna Vulcan, which is going to be a great new anchor.

Structural

The salon bulkhead has been repaired and new seals have been put in place around the doors to try and reduced incoming water.  We’ve also addressed some of the salon window leaks, though that’s a little bit of a work in progress.  We also installed a new trampoline.  The old one was hockey goal netting, which works, but we really wanted something that felt better to walk and stretch out on.

So, we really have made a lot of improvements to the boat.  For so long, we haven’t had many, if any choices about where to go that now that we have some options, we aren’t quite sure what to do.

One thing that has changed is that all of those improvements, cost money.  So the money that we had to spend on traveling (entrance fees to parks, country visas, etc.) is now tied up in the boat.  So, we are going to go somewhere where we can get some work.  We need to rebuild our savings.

The remote jobs that we both have aren’t generating a lot of work right now, so we need something that makes a bit more money.  While I have a donations spot on this webpage, I’ve not really pushed that, and until I can get the site redesigned, I’ve been leary of upgrading my plan to allow for advertising.  So the blog isn’t really a revenue source yet.  

We also need to consider hurricane season as we plan where to go as well.  And meteroologists are predicting a very active 2024 hurricane season.  Of course that could mean a lot of storms out in the Atlantic that don’t make landfall or it could mean several making landfall, you just don’t know.  That’s a consideration as well.  

Last year, while it never made landfall, Hurricane Lee impacted the eastern seaboard of the US north of Florida far more than it impacted Florida. Moving up into the Carolinas or even New England can be just as dicey.  Really, if we are really interested in dodging hurricanes we need to go south, down to Grenada.  

We have some decisions to make, but first we need to finalize a few things on board.  But now it really is time to think about where to go and what we want to do.  No matter where we go, it’ll be a place that gives us access to sailing so that we can practice more.  It will also have some job opportunities for us as well.

I’ll be able to write a bit more too, because, well we are moving out of major refit mode and into some of the more routine maintenance of the boat!