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budget

Countdown to cruising: 9 days to go

Jun 20th, 2011
by Sara.
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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.

Shopping and Chopping

Jan 14th, 2011
by Sara.
4 comments

We made a trek up to Seattle last week, to make a round at our favorite marine stores and gather some goods for this month’s projects. We had a list of things we actually wanted to buy, a list of things we were thinking of buying, and then a mental list of things we just wanted to look at to plan future projects. As we walked around Fisheries Supply, however, our eyes sort of started glazing over and we just about tripped over our jaws at some of the prices on shiny pretty boat gear. We could have easily dropped several boat bucks (fyi: these come in denominations of $1000) on just items to get a few small projects done.

Now, we have spent a fair number of boat bucks in our sailing lifetimes so I’m not sure why the prices of boat gear continue to shock us every time we go into a marine store needing something more involved than a few screws or a light bulb. I think it’s that prices are really going up steadily on most marine stuff (particularly metal items due to the skyrocketing cost of raw metals) but it also has to do with trying to work with a solidly fixed outfitting kitty.

One item on our list were tiny stainless steel sail track stops. These are basically a 1″ piece of curved stainless steel with a screw through it; they affix to the bottom of the mainsail and mizzen sail tracks to keep the sail slides from falling off of it. These retail for $48 apiece. Being we are a ketch we needed two of them. Thankfully, our account price was about $15 less, but still. (Note to new boat owners: get a business license! You will save thousands of boat bucks.) We stood there for a while, trying to wrap our brains around paying $75 for two tiny shiny pieces of hardware to replace the old, sort of broken ones we found at the second hand marine store last year. It didn’t take us long to come up with a solution: fix the old broken ones we already have by buying better fitting screws (cost: $2).

We then meandered over to the block section. Wondertime currently is outfitted with delightful old wooden blocks. While they certainly look charming, they are as heavy as bricks and need varnishing. Do we have time to varnish blocks? Ha. Sailing gear — the kind that will make the boat easier, more fun, and faster to sail is at the top of our list. Our hulk of an Isuzu Pisces diesel engine slups up something like 0.75 gallon/hour; at $3-5 gallon for diesel anything that helps us sail more will save us money (and stinky hot misery) in the long run. We now have shiny lovely (and surprising quite affordable) stainless Garhauer blocks as the top candidates in replacing our wooden mainsheet, staysail and genoa blocks.

Moving on to the plumbing section, we started adding up all the parts we’d need to install fresh and saltwater foot pumps in the galley, and a freshwater foot pump in the head sink to help save our precious freshwater supply. (You use a lot less water pumping it with your foot rather than just letting the faucet run.) We already have one uninstalled Whale Gusher foot pump on board so we were looking at purchasing two more, plus the spigots and related hosing and miscellaneous fittings. After mentally adding everything up, our heads started to spin a little at all the dollars adding up and in the end we decided to demote the freshwater foot pumps and just install the saltwater pump in the galley which we will use for washing dishes, hands, and cooking.

Our morning continued on in this way; as we worked through our list of project stuff we would either realize that the cost just did not justify the importance, or we’d have a spontaneous brainstorm and come up with another, less expensive way to get the same thing done. With Michael on the job for only 5 more months, our projects are getting cut left and right as our remaining budgeted dollars slip out.

On our way home, we made our last stop at West Marine’s gorgeous new Lake Union store and picked up the #1 item at the top of our list: our new 55 lb. Rocna anchor. As our boat — and lives — depend on staying firmly attached in an anchorage, a big, beautiful strong anchor is non-negotiable.

Cracking down

Dec 12th, 2010
by Sara.
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FestiveSo far, December has consisted of mainly three activities:

  1. gearing up for the big Christmas holiday ahead
  2. staying dry
  3. cracking down.

On the staying dry front we have to say that we could not do it without our trusty old Kenmore dehumidifier. Now, this monstrosity, which lives balanced precariously on a battery box in our engine room is obnoxiously loud and creates so much heat that we don’t need to run our other space heaters. This is a good thing of course as it’s typically been 40 degrees outside. We also dump out a gallon and a half of water after a day of running it. This is water that is no longer free to drip steadily off our cold bronze ports and down the uninsulated parts of the hull inside of lockers soaking everything not in tupperware. Also a good thing. Our Shade Tree has also been performing marvelously as a Rain Tree and lets us leave and enter the boat in relative dryness.

With two weeks left until Christmas the girls are as excited as can be about Santa coming for a visit. Since having children, we have been given a whole new appreciation for all that our parents went through to give us the wonderful holidays of our childhood. Which is to say, this holiday is freaking stressful. We are aware that we are on a bit of a teeter-totter with this, our last Christmas in the U.S. for a while. We are happy to see our girls so excited about this holiday, but at the same time we don’t want to build it up too much, for fear that they’ll be disappointed when the next few Christmases are celebrated under palm trees and Santa is a little (lot) more stingy with gifts.

What Michael and I are most excited about this year is New Years; when the clock ticks over to 2011 we will be able to say that we are going cruising “this year.” Not five years from now, not in two years. THIS year. It’s fairly mind-blowing since we’ve been scheming this for so many years. But this also means that we’ll officially have six months left until the dock lines are permanently stored in the bilge. Which means that we need to find that List we’ve got buried around here somewhere and get cracking.

Which brings me back to our Christmas prep; all of this shopping has made me realize that it’s time to crack down on that too. While we’ve always been conscious of what we are spending each month, truthfully certain frivolous expenses have slipped through: a trip through the Starbucks drive-through (Starbucks for four=$ouch!), the random things that find their way into my Target cart, that great deal on a toy at the Goodwill I can’t pass up. We are not going crazy on gifts this year, both because I don’t want Christmas to be about the material stuff to the girls, but also because we’ve realized that our list of “stuff” we need to go cruising just continues to grow (and I’m talking about gear like good tethers and harnesses for all — not negotiable).

What the New Year will bring is a new intensity in our prep to leave next June; whether it’s time spent or something to be purchased, if it doesn’t get us one step closer to leaving then it’s got to be forgotten. This part is difficult, but with the reward actually in sight it’s pretty exciting and come January we’ll attack that List with renewed vigor.

In the meantime, we’ll sit back and watch the joy on the faces of our little girls as small gifts appear under our sparkling boat tree, holiday music cranked up so as to be heard over the humming dehumidifier and raindrops splashing on Wondertime’s decks.

The List

Jun 24th, 2010
by Sara.
2 comments
The List

If you squint, you can just make out all 97 items.

Every cruiser-to-be has got one of these: the List. The list of things to get done on the boat. A copy of our list hangs next to the computer where we sit several times each day. Of course, in order to fit it on one printed page the font is 1.5 pt or something like that which renders it virtually unreadable. But if we squint we can remind ourselves of how close — or how far– we are to setting off in a year. And there is nothing more satisfying than taking a black pen and drawing a line through a finished to-do. Well, maybe except for drawing a squiggly line across it, which means it’s been scratched as a to-do entirely.

On our list, these items are given one of the following priorities:

1 – safety issues that must be done before takeoff
2 – high priority maintenance/improvements
3 – general maintenance/improvements
4 – would be nice.

Up at the top there we have items like “replace seals on windlass,” “purchase life raft,” and “install new non-skid on companionway ladders.” Our #2s are things like “replace wooden blocks” (charming, but heavy as bricks), “rebuild head,” and “sea water foot pump.” #3s are things like new canvas, and #4s are items such as “VSD water pump.”

Of course, these priorities change constantly; for example that VSD fresh water pump just got moved up to a #2 while we’ve been getting ready to live aboard. Our older water pump sounds like a jack jammer has been set loose in the bilge so we’ve decided it’s worth the extra $200 right now for nice silent fresh water delivery like we installed on Rivendell. And other items get moved around too like this.

Our goal when planning our projects for the month, also taking cash and time flow into consideration, is to tackle the jobs at the top — the #1s. For instance, we have “Install new 55lb Delta anchor” up at the top; but our 45 lb CQR is more than adequate for our easy NW summer cruising we’ll be doing this year so this one will wait until next year. Next up in line is to haul all our chain onto the dock and use florescent paint to mark it into 50′ sections (we have been just guessing how much is out by checking how much is left in the chain locker but this probably isn’t a great long term solution).  “Install netting on lifelines” is likely the next to get checked off as this will offer up more security for our two very mobile and active girls.

That’s the plan anyway. The two projects currently underway are replacing a bit of rot on the under side of our bowsprit with West Systems epoxy and installing a new holding tank for living aboard. Michael had discovered some rotten wood underneath the bow roller which got top priority as replacing the whole 8 foot sprit didn’t sound appealing if we ignored it. And the marina wasn’t on board with our “removable” holding tank (i.e. the 5-gallon gas can the head drains into) that some creative former owner thought of. So these two projects got pushed to the top.

The problem, as seems to happen with every to-do list I’ve ever had, is that these two items weren’t actually on the list.

So, when we sat down to review our boat to-dos last night, joyously checking off a few items that had been completed last month, we really didn’t want to add these items and actually bring the list to page number two.

The answer was simple: “install pencil holder” got squigglied.

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