When I first started the blog, my mother requested a RSS feed. I have never used RSS, nor do I really care to use RSS. (I like checking out different pages, and I selectively read articles that appeal to me. I know – I’m a dinosaur.) But I couldn’t let my mom embarrass me by being more technically proficient than I am!

So, after determining what RSS actually is, (and then trying to figure out why there wasn’t an easy way to just get that icon to pop up,) I eventually found a widget that accomplished most of what I wanted. Check it out, it should be on the right side….

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Right about…

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Here —————————————————————————————->>>>>>>>

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I am counting on our readers to let me know if that doesn’t work.  Also, if anyone has anything else they want added, let me know, if I’ve ever heard of it, I just might add it for you!

Normally on a Tuesday night, I watch the one of my favorite shows, Deadliest Catch. Tonight we have some storms moving through the area, so the marina’s cable is out. Fortunately our main source of entertainment, our XM Satellite Radio, still works. I like the radio, it allows me to get work done, clean, or organize stuff.  Tonight it will also allow me to catch the Buffett Concert from Blossom Music Center near Cleveland.  Since Sabrina and I moved to Maryland from Cleveland, and I’ve caught a few concerts at Blossom, it’s nice to hear Buffett from someplace that seems familiar. Along with Radio Margaritaville, I love the XM because it provides me with zero commercials, and all the “bad” country music that I love.

I hope I didn’t just shatter anyone’s false perception that we were minimalists with this talk of TV and XM. To further destroy our image, we also have a freezer on board.  And air conditioning.  And a microwave.

These are all comforts that we have found necessary in our current phase of our life.  We’ve lived aboard for just over five years, through blizzards or heat waves, and until this November, we will have had to go to work at professional jobs. (From experience, it’s not easy sitting in an early meeting with a client with mal de dembarquement from a rolling night aboard in the marina.)

We enjoy our current comforts and we’re okay giving some of them up to go cruising.  We don’t have a generator on board, so no air conditioning, and I doubt we’ll watch much TV, but I want to keep the XM….

For as long as the satellites can reach us….

I’ve added a new page which shows our current location from our “Spot” device. If you’re having a hard time finding the page, try clicking here.

Since I finally added our location, I figured it might be time to talk a little bit about our home port, Bohemia Bay Yacht Harbour. We’ve called BBYH our summer home for five years, and people are always asking us, “How did you pick BBYH?” Our honest and simple answer, “The bathrooms are very nice.”

That’s right, we’ve come to love BBYH for a variety of reasons:

• The harbor is calm and protected, regardless of the weather
• It’s a short drive to our respective jobs
• We’ve made great friends and miss them over the winter
• The pool is large and a great place to exercise or relax
• It’s QUIET during the week, no traffic, no city noise, it’s country living – on the water
• The docks are long and allow us to pull bow-in for privacy, with nice secure cleats
• It’s mostly freshwater, but in the fall you can catch crabs right out front

But the original reason we decided to keep our boat at Bo Bay:

• The bathrooms are nice, and nothing is more important to a liveaboard than a nice bathroom

We do have some things that we’re not crazy about, astute readers will notice that I called BBYH our “summer home” above.  It’s not because we move to land in the winter (no, that would be cheating), it’s because we’re not allowed to stay here through the winter.  In the by-laws at Bo Bay they don’t allow live-aboards through the winter, so we move over to Tidewater Marina in Havre de Grace, MD. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for example, two winters ago when Maryland was hit by multiple blizzards, a covered dock shed at BBYH collapsed from the snow load.  Luckily no one was hurt, but I don’t know what we would have done if we would have been here.

So, after all these years, we feel content calling BBYH our home port.  Will we miss it when we’re gone? Yes, most likely when we’re having a hard time sleeping in a rolly anchorage or a rough marina.  I also imagine we’ll swing through on our way north and south to see friends, perform maintenance, or leave the boat for a few weeks while we travel to see family.

And that’s what a “home port”  means to us.  Some place where we can relax, we feel safe leaving the boat for a few weeks, and when we come in people wave and call us by name….

BBYH Lighthouse

For those of you that are following along on the “Visitor Map,” this morning at 9:21 am EDT marked a very special moment for this blog- We had our 100th unique visitor!So thank you to all of the people that have visited this blog, please keep stopping back. In the future I promise nice pictures of colorful fish, tranquil harbors, and secluded beaches!

And a special thanks to you, our 100th visitor from Washington D.C.!

I received some strange looks yesterday when other sailors asked what I was currently doing on the boat to get ready for departure…. My sheepish reply, “Uhhh, umm, I’m currently compounding the deck….”

Yep, that’s right.  Compounding the deck.

Currently I’m not installing solar panels, or water makers, or compiling charts, or hooking up the radar, or any number of awesome things that would-be cruisers always write about.  Currently I am in the process of using 3M rubbing compound with a Dewalt buffer to take oxidation off the deck.  (For those of you without boats, after time in the sun, gelcoat will start to “chalk.”  This chalk is oxidation and can be removed with a whole lot of elbow grease.  Or a mechanical buffer spinning at 2500 rpm with some heavy duty rubbing compound.) Some might think this is frivolous, but for me, I’d go crazy while cruising if the boat didn’t look nice. Yes, even in paradise. Also, polished boats clean up a lot easier than oxidized boats. So I view my current toils as an investment in my future relaxation.

In my defense, it made more sense to buff now, before I install a bunch of things that I would have to buff around.  The main problem I’m encountering is a serious outbreak of spiders that I have to clean off before I buff every evening when the shade hits the deck.  That’s the other thing I discussed with the other sailors, how this year has been horrible for 8-legged menaces.

So there you have it, currently the number one priority (in my mind at least) is a nicely buffed and gleaming deck. And don’t worry, the topsides and hull will follow this fall when we get hauled out for a fresh coat of wax.

Waxing, buffing, and killing spiders…  Truly living the dream.

We’re heading out to enjoy the day on the water with friends and then hopefully catch some fireworks later tonight.  We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!

As I mentioned the other day, our camera was full when we were in the Adirondacks. I cleared it off the other day and we had over a year of pictures.  Here’s a random clearing house of things we’ve done over that time, in no particular order:

Sabrina and I returned Tuesday from a long weekend in the Adirondacks with my mom’s two sisters and their families.  It was a great time and I love the Adirondacks for the rest and relaxation. It’s nice in the mountains because it’s always cool this time of year and the water is clear.  The one thing that we didn’t love was the fact that it rained off and on from Friday till Sunday night. 

Luckily, Monday was absolutely beautiful and we took that opportunity to get out of camp.  We hiked up to a fire tower on “Bald Mountain,” visited some old growth trees at “Cathedral Pines,” and walked down a floating trail at “Ferd’s Bog.” (Unfortunately, I forgot to clear some pictures off of our camera, and our SD Card was full. Luckily my aunt and uncle took a ton of pictures, I’ll post more when we get them.)

Here’s photos of the pines and some from Bald Mountain overlooking the Fulton Chain of Lakes:

The weekend was also a great time to dust off the old Sunfish sailboat that was stuck in a building at the camp.  I was able to pass on some sailing knowledge to my cousins and I was very happy to watch one of my cousins sailing around the lake solo after a few quick lessons!  (Not to mention it was a blast for me to get out and sail something so simple and carefree.)

The trip was bittersweet because we know that we are leaving this fall and next summer we won’t be able to do things like this. Not only was the weekend a time to have fun with family from Michigan and Las Vegas, but it was our time to start saying our goodbyes. I keep telling everyone, you’re not losing a cousin/nephew in Maryland, you’re gaining one in the Caribbean!  Hopefully we’ll have visitors while we are out exploring.

It was nice to get away from everything for a few days, no “To-Do” lists, no phone service, and no TV.  We had a great time visiting with family and hearing about what is happening in their lives. But now we’re back in Maryland, it’s hot, it’s humid and there is work to be done.  After all, there’s only 123 days left to go….

As I originally promised, there will be new features added to this blog as I learn more about WordPress. Today’s cool new feature is aVisitor Map. It’s a worldwide map, and it places a dot at your approximate location when you stop by the website, so check it out via that hyperlink.  (There’s also a tab in the upper right corner of your screen for future use.)

In addition, this is the first post that is linked to my Facebook page (theoretically.)  Let’s see what happens!

Happy first day of summer!

When I was growing up I always hated those Country Time Lemonade ads. It was the commercial with the voiceover that lamented, ‘Summer is a short 90 days… enjoy Country Time Lemonade before summer is gone.’  It seemed I always saw that commercial near the first day of summer, when school had just ended and things were just starting to get fun.  Summer was full of promise, there were fish to be caught, games to be played, fireflies to catch, camping trips with the Boy Scouts, etc. But no sooner had it started and Country Time was there to tell me that it was going to END!  It’s like that guy that tells you on the summer solstice that the days are only going to get shorter from here….

A few years ago, I found out that sailors were celebrating summer by participating in the “Summer Sailstice.”  It’s a cool idea, and a couple of times we’ve unofficially participated as we sailed along on the specified weekend.  Sunday night about 10-12 sailboats pulled into the marina, and I saw several more anchored out on the Bohemia River.  I came to find out that they were participating in the Sailstice DelMarVa Rally 2011.  (For those of you unfamiliar with the area, the peninsula formed by portions of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia is referred to as the DelMarVa Peninsula.  You can circumnavigate the north edge through the C&D Canal, south through Delaware Bay, along the coast in the Atlantic Ocean, and back north in the Chesapeake Bay.  Our marina is a short sail from the mouth of the Canal, making it a great staging point for boats making the journey.)  

For a brief moment, I wanted to jump on our boat and sail away with them. Then reality set it and I remembered that our boat is in the middle of several separate projects and we weren’t leaving the dock.  That thought really made me realize that this summer we’ll have to pass on a lot of fun weekends of sailing, grilling out with friends, and enjoying lemonade by the pool.  Like the commercials from my youth stated, summer will be over before I realize it. Our countdown clock tells me that there are only 132 days left till we leave and I must stay focused on the task at hand.

After all, I’m burning daylight, the days are only going to get shorter from here.

We talk with people all the time (either in person, or online) who are either cruising, or preparing to cruise in the next couple years. It seems that everyone has an opinion on what is “required equipment.” But who can really say that this exact piece of equipment is required for US?

One great thing about the cruising community is that almost everyone is very helpful and it’s nice to hear differing points of view on how they’ve accomplished their dream. I try to listen to all ideas, see what fits for us, and adapt it to our future cruising plans. For instance, S/V Kaleo was nice enough to answer our questions on their watermaker installation.  They reinforced some conclusions we had drawn, and therefore we’ll probably be contacting Rich at CruiseRO for a high-output watermaker before we head out.  Another great example is our friends on S/V Moon Shadow and our long discussions about dinghies. The dinghy is  a balancing act of size, functionality, storage, and purpose. I would LOVE a beautiful RIB with a 25hp engine that could zip me around to explore exotic locals.  We could scuba dive off of it, and fly fish for bonefish in the flats, and troll offshore for marlin, and, and, imagine the possibilities!  But then reality sets in and I ask myself, ‘where will I put it?’

So we find ourselves evaluating our purchases very carefully.  We hypothesize, research, create a few spreadsheets, analyze ROI or pounds/watt or fuel consumption, etc.  Our good friends on S/V Minx provide a great sounding board for all ideas of mine, both crazy and practical. (On the crazy side, if anyone wants my plans for a bike powered battery charger  that provides both exercise and free energy, just email me.)

And that leads me to the overall point of this article:  How do you know what kind of cruiser you’ll be until you cruise?

I wish I could flash forward a year and see what pieces of equipment we wish we had, and which pieces are gathering dust.  Some pieces of so-called “required equipment” are very easy to evaluate, for example, a Monitor Windvane.  Cruisers that have windvanes love them, and many people list it as their next big purchase.  But for us, it’s just another thing to trip over on the way to the water with a scuba tank on our back.  (See, since I can’t fit the aforementioned RIB, we’ll probably end up making a lot of dives off the big boat.) But other items are in a gray area, do we need it?  Do we want it?  Things that are as small as a pressure cooker (to cook meals faster and save propane,) to things as large as a generator or solar panels (to provide power without firing up the engine.)

It’s all a balancing act of what we think we’re going to do when we cast off the dock lines.  I know we’re not sailing south out of the Chesapeake Bay and turning left for the Mediterranean, (if we were, we’d probably want that windvane.)  But how do I know how long we will like to stay anchored in one spot?  How often we’ll motorsail?  How often we’ll be in a port with water or electricity?

And this leads us to think about the future, contemplate whether or not this piece will complement our lives, and then see how much it costs (the real limiting factor.)

Because if you’re independently wealthy, ignore everything I just said, and just buy two of everything. After all, you never truly know what you need until you get out there….