Preparing to exchange one life for another
currently in: Durango, CO

We've got one-way tickets to Myrtle Beach (well, to Wilmington NC, because it was cheaper) for Saturday morning early, and we're frantically trying to get everything finished that needs to get finished before we leave. Yikes! So much to do - and that's before tackling the things that need to be done to get Windom back in the water.

It's really a lot more complicated to have two separate lives - more-or-less normal working people, with a house and a cat and jobs and community involvement, and cruisers on a boat with no fixed address - than it is to manage either of those separately. (And more expensive as well!)

We've been buying equipment we know we'll need, everything from new hinges for our big Lewmar hatches that failed last trip, to a wi-fi bridge that will hopefully make it easier to pick up signals from the boat. We bought a rugged 80GB USB hard disk and have been loading it up with charts and music. Britt's been feverishly trying to finish his work projects, and I've been doing taxes and wrapping up some of my own work.

Last time we left for a boat venture, we were in the middle of remodeling, so we had the more intrusive work (ripping off the back of the house, knocking out and remodeling the only bathroom) done while we were gone. The contractor had been working on our house for some time by then (along with Britt!) so we trusted him to take care of things in our absence, and in any event the house wasn't fit to rent out. This year, all of our leads for renting to friends fell through; four months is too short for the local property management places to handle, and we were reluctant to just rent to strangers after our neighbors had some bad experiences. Instead, the house will sit empty for some weeks - friends will check on it - and then some friends of ours, who moved to New Zealand and will be back on a visit, will house-sit for us. So there's cleaning and organizing to be done, breakers to be shut off, instructions to be written, services to be suspended, and so on.

The boat, on the other hand, has sat on blocks in a boatyard for nearly two years now, and I'm scared to see what we'll find. I bet it's filthy both inside and out; the wood is probably peeling and the fiberglass dull. I remember when we first got back to the boat after it had been stored in Florida for two years, I was so depressed about Windom's condition I was ready to turn around and go back to Colorado! But re-reading our old logs from December 2004 reminds me that although it's certainly going to be a lot of work, it's not insurmountable.

Yesterday, when I was walking around town on errands, I noticed crocuses blooming in front of City Hall. It's been sunny and pleasant here in Colorado, an odd time, it seemed, to be thinking of islands and sailing. But this morning I woke up to a blizzard. As I write this sitting in an armchair in front of the wood stove, our cat vying with my laptop for space, I glance over at the snow falling on the other side of the window, and I start getting excited about heading out to sea again.
- posted by S/V Windom @ 2/28/2007 [link]  2 comments Post a Comment