Moving Aboard

Moving Aboard

The past week has been incredibly exciting, busy and exhausting as after months of anticipation, we’re finally moving aboard!  We've been living in an apartment, just a few miles away from the commissioning office for 7 months. In that time, everything we put in the apartment was intended for the boat with the exception of a few items that we rented.  I knew we had a lot of things but wow, every time I think “that has to be the last car load”, somehow there’s more, much more.  (The bulk of it seems to be quilting supplies and wine, I think I may be in need of an intervention or two…)

As of today, Sunday, we have a good grip on it and Blossom is looking amazing. A testament to the boat, all that stuff is finding a home and we still have some empty cupboards, albeit they’re the small ones J  With all our things in the boat she’s so comfortable and she feels like home.  Here are a few pictures of what she’s looking like so far:

The Salon and Galley

Our wall cupboard wine storage system. It’s a great use of a strange, narrow space that couldn't be used for much else.

The Master Stateroom

The Guest Stateroom/Quilt room

The Pilot House

The next few days we’ll be continuing to stow things away, work on small projects, provision and get ready to leave. Martin has been very busy tying down various things in the lazarette and in the space under the helm of the fly bridge. He converted a car bike rack to be used in the laz to store the bikes, has put up our boat poles and is making fender boards for the boat. 

We still have a couple issues with the boat.  The latest is a bad harness on chiller #2. This means we only have 1 chiller and if this goes kaput, we have no air con.  I’ll leave Martin to discuss all things mechanical. I understand what’s going on but I don’t have the language to explain it in a respectable manner. The upshot is that it’s not the main unit (as thought for a day or two – this would be a horrible thing, requiring a few days to fix with no air conditioning).  The tech thinks that it's a harness which only requires a couple of hours to fix.  There is no tech available next week in Stuart so the part is being shipped to Virginia. We’ll have it installed when we reach Norfolk.

So what’s next?  We leave Stuart, learn to operate our boat, and set out on route to rendezvous with our friends, Sean & Louise, who are currently anchored out in NY.

Part 1: Destination Norfolk, VA.  Our salesman, Jeff Merrill, is coming to Stuart tomorrow. We plan to head out on Wednesday or Thursday. We’ll probably stop in Cocoa Beach overnight and then head to Charleston, SC. We’ll stay there a night or two and then go on to Norfolk. We’ll be training in close quarter maneuvering, docking, etc. along the way. To begin with, Martin will be learning to captain, I will learn to stand watch and handle the lines.  This is the minimum required for the two of us to operate the boat without help. We are so excited about our time with Jeff. Jeff not only sold us the boat and is a great captain, but we consider him a good friend and he’s a pleasure to be with. We can’t wait!

Part 2: Destination Baltimore, MD. Jeff will leave us on the 27^th from Norfolk and we’ll be joined by our second training captain, Jim Mobley on August 29th.  We’ll head north to Chesapeake with Jim, destination Baltimore. 

Part 3:  Cruising with friends. Once we've made it to Baltimore we may drop Jim off or he may stay with us a while, that's tbd based on other commitments he may have.  At that point, we’ll see where our friends are and rendezvous.  They should be a bit north at that point. We'll then return south to Baltimore by the 20^th to meet with our designer, Scott Cole, who will be photographing the boat, and to attend Trawler Fest, the 25-28^th.

We have lots of ideas and even one “plan” for the fall. All in good time in another blog post...