After a long winter, Windara finally launched on May 12. I couldn’t wait for her to be back afloat, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling at least some conflicting emotions. What would it be like to transition back to boat life after a long period of shore life? Would I still like it, would I remember everything? We thought about coming up for launch, but we were up at Front Street on Friday, then went to the Cape for Mother’s Day, and then would have had to come back on Monday morning.
Even though we were back in the water, there was still a lot to be done. We had our own list of projects and deep cleaning to do, and I don’t think there was a weekend where we weren’t at Hamilton Marine for something or other. Plus Front Street still had a few things to finish up – our reefing lines, some work on the electronics, propane tanks, and stuff like that. We were on the dock for a couple weeks and then they moved us out to a floating dock, so it made it easier as we ferried load after load of stuff back aboard from the apartment and storage. We’re thrilled with where she’s at – between the work that we had Front Street handle and the projects we took on, Windara is in the best shape she’s been in since probably before we bought her. We still have a list of projects to do, but other than our watermaker, everything else can wait. (We’ll do a full rundown of the refit with before/afters in another post.)
We continued to weed out spares and consolidate/reorganize our storage, and while we don’t have everything back aboard, we do have most of our stuff and we still have WAY more storage space than we’ve ever had. I’m working on building out a maintenance list and inventory so that we’re better able to stay ahead of projects and so that we actually know what we’ve got aboard.
Once we had most of our stuff aboard and felt like we were pretty solid on projects, we moved her out to her summer mooring and took her out for a brief shakedown. We found a couple little things, but for the most part everything worked well. We were cruising along at over 7kts with just the jib out, and it reminded us just how fast Windara is.
As excited as we are to be back on the water, we’re also still up in the air. Chris is looking for a job, and we’re not sure if that means we’re staying ashore a bit longer or if we’re rejoining the cruising world – or if we’re able to go to the Bahamas if we do. It will all depend on what his work allows, so we really don’t know what our plan is. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of the options, but in the meantime, we’re going to continue to get Windara set up for cruising and we’ll take advantage of being in Maine for the season. We’re just about to head out for a three week cruise, and I’m so looking forward to every second.
