Refrigeration installed.
Last trip to Target complete.
More stuff sold via Craigslist.
Another carload donated to the thrift shop.
Picnic with girls at the park.
First day of Summer.
One more week to go.
Time to celebrate.
cruising prep
Countdown to cruising: 9 days to go
Nearly 150 lbs of old stainless wire...$98 in our pocket.
Every few days we give a little thought to our budget, which has been completely overrun to put it mildly. Thankfully, the few things we have sold here and there, such as the stainless wire we took to Tacoma Metals today in exchange for nearly $100, plus the selling of our car and other miscellaneous items sold via Craigslist will help replenish our pool titled “life savings” aka “boat self-insurance policy” we promised we weren’t going to touch. It doesn’t matter much at this point: all the major items have been purchased and it just reinforces that we are going to have to pick up a little work here and there to keep Wondertime shipshape and be able to afford things like a new(er) dinghy as our Costco clearance model is on its last legs. Our last major purchase at this point: food. And bags of wine to tuck deep in the bilge for, you know, extra buoyancy.
Countdown to cruising: 10 days to go
Michael finally wrapped the last spreader boot...standing rigging wire replacement is DONE!
Our race to be “ready” to leave the dock has officially begun. With only 10 days left to go we are literally making sure every last minute counts so we get our last few Must Dos done. While the list sounds basic: finish refrigeration install, pack spare parts and tools aboard, finish moving stuff from our big to our small storage unit, pack Leah’s old clothes up for Holly to wear over the next two years, sell camping gear, shop for and pile provisions onboard, decide which skeins of yarn to bring aboard from my two-crate stash, find room for 50 lbs of books, restock our first aid kit and ditch bag… well actually that sounds like quite a lot for the next 10 days. Which explains why for the past week we’ve been working non-stop from the time we wake up to the time we drop into our bunk late at night.
This part sucks, folks. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. While we have tiny flashes of excitement here and there that we are actually going to be cruising in 10 days, mostly we are just really anxious for this last part to be done with. We’ll leave with many many things undone but at least we’ll leave knowing we’ve given it our best shot at getting stuff accomplished while having access to our car and familiar stores while we can. After all, at this point the only thing that has to happen is making sure all the stuff piled on the dock is piled on the boat. All the rest will continue underway.
Even so, my lists of things to do/buy/sort/store/get is constantly running through my head and there are many moments each day where I feel like I’m teetering on the finest of edges between calm and completely losing it. I’m getting very good at focusing on what I’m doing, each minute at a time. Truly living in the now. Otherwise I find myself bouncing around between 20 things, and not getting any of them done. One of which is making sure our girls are fed and relatively happy: since they’ve been given pretty much free reign to our DVD collection and streaming Netflix for the next week I think they are doing fine.
Yesterday, Michael finished putting up the very last of our 22 new standing rigging wires, a huge job we are happy to have behind us. He’s putting the finishing touches on installing new shelves in our engine room which will house most of our tools and many spare parts. Nearly all of our mementos are sorted, crated and stacked neatly in our 5×5 storage unit. Our last unneeded valuables are getting sold via Craigslist and many more items have been donated to our favorite local thrift shop. Final doctors appointments and immunizations are done, summer clothes are onboard and folded away, our mail forwarding cued up with USPS. We officially sold our trusty Subaru today to a friend (Thank You Angela!!) and will hand it off the night before we cast off.
Sometimes, when you look ahead too much and can’t stop thinking about how far you have to go, all you need to really do is look back and see how far you’ve come. Then you realize, you’re practically there.
Haulout…check!
We put it off as long as we could but finally couldn’t make any more excuses to haul Wondertime out of the water for some new bottom paint and a few other jobs. With only two more weeks until we depart, it was time to get it over with.
Haulouts are never fun: along with dropping $500 just to lift, store the boat on the hard for three days and relaunch, not to mention several more hundreds of dollars just for copper bottom paint it’s a painful time money-wise. Michael is officially unemployed now (yahoo!) so that means that he now gets to go to work with the nasty job of prepping and painting Wondertime’s bottom. And with hauling our two girls up and down the ladder in the toxic workyard not an option, we are pretty much rendered homeless (but as you’ll see in the photos below, we didn’t suffer too badly).
Michael worked non-stop for three days to sand, prep and paint the bottom, install the keel cooler for our new Vitrifrigo refrigeration system and replace the corroded head intake thru-hull. He worked right up until the travel lift came to splash us back in the water polishing the hull paint. Wondertime was looking mighty sparkly when she dipped her keel into the water again we think. Thankfully (except for the bottom paint not going as far as promised and having to rush to Fisheries in Seattle at 4 pm on Sunday to pick up another gallon) all went well during this haul. We are sure glad to get this major milestone checked off.
Wondertime is hauled out: all looks good so far.
Holly wonders what on earth her home is doing flying through the air.
Our boatyard cat is none too pleased about the view
Would you rather be in a cubicle or sanding the bottom of your boat?
Our waterline needed a little adjustment...up of course.
The girls and I spent the weekend at our good friends' beachfront house eating fresh oysters from their farm: a mighty fine way to spend the weekend hauled out.
When your home is out of the water what else is there for a boatkid to do but...play on the beach?
Our new Vitrifrigo keel cooler is installed
Done and ready for launch
Splash!
Books as ballast
Wondertime's bookshelf. Already a bit crowded....
With nearly all systems ready and the standing rigging replacement just about complete, Michael and I have been left to concentrate on tucking away the hundreds of pounds of spare parts, tools, clothes, sails, toys, art supplies and books we want to take along into Wondertime’s cubbies. As it currently stands, by the time we get around to packing the food on board it appears that we’ll all be stuffing our pillows with dried rice and pasta. But as always, I’m sure everything will find it’s place eventually.
My job this week is to sort through the eight crates of books that have been in our storage locker and make the painful choice as to which ones go with us, which ones stay in their crates and which ones go on to new homes. This is no easy task: I’ve already weeded out our book collections many times previously, moving from house to house and then onboard Wondertime last year. The remaining ones are our very favorites and now it’s time to weed through them and pick out our very very favorites.
Today, I sorted through our three crates of sailing books. This actually wasn’t too difficult as many of them are collectibles we’ve already read so I easily filled a crate with those books. Others were outdated (but beloved) guidebooks from past cruises, favorite old “how to go cruising” books (before we found out the only way to really find out how to go cruising is to GO cruising), and a variety of reference books that we haven’t cracked since Google was invented. Another crate holds our favorite sailing stories. I will no doubt miss these and yearn to reread many as we travel (I am sure a fourth reading of Maiden Voyage
Finally, the chosen few were selected and packed into a relatively small cardboard box for transport afloat: Charlie’s Charts of Mexico, our Mexico Lonely Planet guides, Nigel Calder’s Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual
That done, I am now moving on to my cookbooks, fiction books, general reference books, children’s picture books and children’s chapter books. I have a sneaking suspicion that there is going to be yet another round of book sorting.
