We’ve been quiet since we got back, but we’ve been keeping busy! Our time in New York has absolutely flown by, and we’re just waiting for weather to cooperate to cast off the lines once more.
While we’ve been here, we’ve made a lot of changes. We closed on the sale of our beloved Silent Sky, which was an emotional rollercoaster to say the least. Our buyers were challenging and by the end of the drawn-out process, I was starting to understand those who consider the day you sell one of the happiest days of a boat owner’s life.
I wanted to keep the apartment last year so if long-term cruising wasn’t our thing, we weren’t stuck. Between co-op maintenance fees and a mortgage, it amounted to a pretty darned expensive storage unit, and now that I’m certain I love this lifestyle, it’s time to let it go. It’s amazing how much stuff we got rid of, and I still feel like we should get rid of more. My parents graciously let us take up space in their driveway so we could keep our car, and my brothers were kind enough to drive down and bring it back to MA for us.
It wouldn’t be boat ownership if some major boat projects weren’t thrown into the mix. On the way up, about 20 miles off Ambrose Channel Chris noticed the steering would become unresponsive briefly when the rudder was centered. We decided to get it checked, and it turns out that our upper rudder bearing was cracked. When the yard dropped the rudder, it turned out that the lower bearing was ok but worn, and it was a bit of a funky retrofitted part… which of course meant $$, but worth dealing with. We also had the rig inspected and found our backstay tensioner was shot, so we had that replaced.
We didn’t have a macerator on either of the two heads, so we added one to the forward holding tank. We get pump out whenever it’s available – the ocean is our home and we do as much as possible to limit our impact – but when overboard discharge is unavoidable, we begrudgingly do so (following legal requirements, of course). The way the boat was set up, waste that went to the holding tank either needed to be pumped out (either by boat or a shoreside facility) or could be manually pumped straight overboard. Without a macerator, that means solids are still, well, solid, and we need to go 12 miles offshore to empty the holding tank when we can’t get pump out (which is pretty much everywhere in The Bahamas), and that’s not always practical.
Between the complexity of the bearing replacement and additional work we had done, a one-week repair turned into a month. And since we knew the rudder bearings were shot, we were hesitant to do any local cruising before we brought the boat in. So we pretty much lost the season, but I’m glad we got the major repairs taken care of by knowledgeable people, and I’d rather have it happen while we had the apartment, car, and access to our home yacht club. Now that we have the boat back, we’ve been working through getting organized and finding at least temporary homes for everything aboard, and she’s finally feeling like home.
We had hoped to be under way again by now, but the weather the past two weekends didn’t cooperate. First we had Fiona off the coast two weekends ago, then last weekend, the remains of Ian came up the coast and have been sitting off New Jersey for the past few days. We’ve made the best of it, taking time to enjoy a bit of fall weather and go apple picking, running last-minute errands, and getting the boat better set up, including setting up Starlink! (As an aside, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about how we manage to work while traveling/living aboard, so I’ll pull together a post on that soon.)
Our goal is to bring the boat over to Port Washington after work tomorrow so we can fuel up, get pump out, and provision one last time before we head off – we’ve been closely watching the weekend weather and it looks like this weekend is go time. I’m always a little sad leaving, but I’m so excited to get back out on the water and start traveling again.