Our trip back to the boat a couple weeks ago meant more work, clean a lot, there is dirt everywhere. The boat is structurally sound, but needs seriously cleaning and repairs. The previous owners just made a mess.
Installed composting head, tested it out and it works great. The urine jug gets full quick with all three of us peeing in it, then emptying it is a chore and sometimes the urine smell is yucky. We are thinking about alternate ways of emptying our pee. The compost for poop works great. There is hardly any odor. We poop in it, use toilet paper, spray little water, turn handle, and no odor! We love this composting head.
We've been fighting some kind of cold or flu, or maybe both. This being sick and trying to clean sucks. I got some herbs at the store and have been making all kinds of teas to help our congestion and cough, some work better than others. Slowly our medicine cabinet is shrinking and our herb collection is growing. We intend to stay away from modern medicine and nurture our illness with natural remedies. It takes longer, but in the long run it will make us stronger. Plus we no longer have insurance, and cannot imagine how expensive it would be for all three of us to visit the doctor and pay for the medications prescribed.
Now that we have stayed on the boat we are realizing how much stuff we still have in our house that we gotta get rid of. The boat is nice and cozy, just big enough for us. There is storage everywhere in this thing. It is smaller than our house, but cozy. So we get back home and we realize, oh my we have a lot more stuff to get rid of. We have to reduce our clothes, kitchen, bathroom, toys, books, memorabilia, pictures on wall, papers, tools, hobby stuff, bikes, and finish scanning all our thousands of photos. It is a lot of work, we have already reduced so much, we have more to do but I know we can do it.
We left her again and cannot wait to go back!
Our Boat
Westsail 32, s/v Harbinger
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Cleaning and fix boat, then clean and fix boat some more
Homeschooling our son
Our son is preschool age. He is so happy now that he does not go to daycare every day. When I first got laid off from my job, he used to ask me every morning "am I going to preschool" and I tell him no you stay home with mommy and we will have school at home. He would be so happy after we talked about no more preschool. Then he would not want to get out of his pajamas, I think he knew that when he got dressed that meant he had to go to school.
Now almost 4 months after being home together, he still asks me about once a week, "do I have to go to preschool?" Then I remind him we have school at home and he no longer goes to preschool, he says "oh". When we drive by his school he says "hi" and "bye" to it. He will then point up to the hill, where I used to work near his school, and says "there is mommy's work". I remind him that he and mommy work and have school at home, and he says "oh". He is still processing all this information.
I can say that I am learning more every day about him and his personality. His favorite color, foods, toileting habits, clothes, naps, and toys. He shows us how creative and curious he is every day. We spend all day together, and now that my hubby is home more too, he loves it. He is a different child now that he is with us more, we love it.
We read to him daily, its pretty much when we/he feels like it. He talks clear and can count to 10. He can recite half the alphabet. We plan to keep his home school as unstructured as possible. We have a routine, he gets up every day by 7 am, takes his nap about 1pm for couple hours, and goes to bed by 8 pm. While he is young we let him learn his environment, while learning the basics learning blocks for english and math, and living life. He knows where the store, post office, mall, marina, mountains, ocean, and capital are. He points to their directions when we are driving. He also is learning the parts to a sailboat, he will tell us about the mast, jib sail, and main sail. He really likes talking about the jib sail.
We like to keep him active too. We go for walks almost daily, sometimes to the park or store. And take him to places where other kids are, so he can interact and play in a different environment from home or boat. He is pretty social at times, but when he is building legos or trains no one else exists and no one can interfere with it. He gets very focused on those building toys.
With a tv and computer it sometimes is hard to limit screen time. We let him experience cartoons, movies, and games, but then we turn them off and go do other things. It is easy to use screen time to keep him occupied and out of our hair, but that is no good. We will watch movies or cartoons with him in morning or evening, then turn them off.
This last week we learned I am pregnant, so this sort of puts a wrinkle in some of our plans. I am happy because I didn't want him to be an only child, our son is too little to understand. He did say he wants a brother. We are planning another home birth with the midwife, not sure where, can't imagine all this labor on a boat (a baby born on the boat?). Our son was born in water, a birthing pool in our living room. We will see what happens. : )
Now almost 4 months after being home together, he still asks me about once a week, "do I have to go to preschool?" Then I remind him we have school at home and he no longer goes to preschool, he says "oh". When we drive by his school he says "hi" and "bye" to it. He will then point up to the hill, where I used to work near his school, and says "there is mommy's work". I remind him that he and mommy work and have school at home, and he says "oh". He is still processing all this information.
I can say that I am learning more every day about him and his personality. His favorite color, foods, toileting habits, clothes, naps, and toys. He shows us how creative and curious he is every day. We spend all day together, and now that my hubby is home more too, he loves it. He is a different child now that he is with us more, we love it.
We read to him daily, its pretty much when we/he feels like it. He talks clear and can count to 10. He can recite half the alphabet. We plan to keep his home school as unstructured as possible. We have a routine, he gets up every day by 7 am, takes his nap about 1pm for couple hours, and goes to bed by 8 pm. While he is young we let him learn his environment, while learning the basics learning blocks for english and math, and living life. He knows where the store, post office, mall, marina, mountains, ocean, and capital are. He points to their directions when we are driving. He also is learning the parts to a sailboat, he will tell us about the mast, jib sail, and main sail. He really likes talking about the jib sail.
We like to keep him active too. We go for walks almost daily, sometimes to the park or store. And take him to places where other kids are, so he can interact and play in a different environment from home or boat. He is pretty social at times, but when he is building legos or trains no one else exists and no one can interfere with it. He gets very focused on those building toys.
With a tv and computer it sometimes is hard to limit screen time. We let him experience cartoons, movies, and games, but then we turn them off and go do other things. It is easy to use screen time to keep him occupied and out of our hair, but that is no good. We will watch movies or cartoons with him in morning or evening, then turn them off.
This last week we learned I am pregnant, so this sort of puts a wrinkle in some of our plans. I am happy because I didn't want him to be an only child, our son is too little to understand. He did say he wants a brother. We are planning another home birth with the midwife, not sure where, can't imagine all this labor on a boat (a baby born on the boat?). Our son was born in water, a birthing pool in our living room. We will see what happens. : )
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
More downsizing
We managed to sell our living room furniture, upon return from purchasing our boat. Now we are using lawn chairs and foam to lay on. There is still so much more to go, we have collected so much stuff over the years. We just keep plugging away selling and donating our stuff. And scan away all our pictures and next all our documents, that'll be a huge job. I'm still persuading my hubby we need an adf scanner for that job.
Cleaning sails is a chore. The sails for this 32 ft boat are huge compared to our previous smaller 26 ft boat. The drifter was easy to clean, a fragile nylon fabric, we had to be pretty careful with the cleaner and the way we did it. Now it looks nice, smells good, and is in need of some patch work. The main, jib, genoa, and staysail are big and in need of more cleaning and repair. We've tried to get the rusty stains out of the genoa with not much luck, and used just about every chemical we could find. Unfortunately, none of them worked, but that big old sail looks somewhat cleaner.
Finish the rebuild on the car is still going on while we are downsizing and fixing this boat. It makes me tired just thinking about all what needs to be done to finish this car, but once it is done we will be so happy.
Play! Well we would like to do more of this, however, we are so busy with all these projects our heads are spinning. For the kids, we do try to get some play time in. Seems like we are way more busy now with out a full-time job, except we don't have all the crazy stress of the job, and we get to hang out and enjoy each other. This was the whole purpose of changing our lives!
Cleaning sails is a chore. The sails for this 32 ft boat are huge compared to our previous smaller 26 ft boat. The drifter was easy to clean, a fragile nylon fabric, we had to be pretty careful with the cleaner and the way we did it. Now it looks nice, smells good, and is in need of some patch work. The main, jib, genoa, and staysail are big and in need of more cleaning and repair. We've tried to get the rusty stains out of the genoa with not much luck, and used just about every chemical we could find. Unfortunately, none of them worked, but that big old sail looks somewhat cleaner.
Finish the rebuild on the car is still going on while we are downsizing and fixing this boat. It makes me tired just thinking about all what needs to be done to finish this car, but once it is done we will be so happy.
Play! Well we would like to do more of this, however, we are so busy with all these projects our heads are spinning. For the kids, we do try to get some play time in. Seems like we are way more busy now with out a full-time job, except we don't have all the crazy stress of the job, and we get to hang out and enjoy each other. This was the whole purpose of changing our lives!
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Purchasing the boat
Wow, what a week it was. We viewed the two boats and decided on her, my husband and I pretty much had our mind made up after we sat in her and visited with the owner.
We talked all night about what we liked and did not like, then we went and saw her again the next day. It was business this time, we spoke to a surveyor and started talking money. The owner was pretty set on his price 26,500, he did go down to 25,000. We shook on the price and pending the survey, then left this was on Saturday.
My husband and I got into a big argument on Sunday, he drove home to get the money and more stuff. On Monday, we called and scheduled for marinas, survey, and haul out for Thursday, told owner we would need boat at marina by Wednesday. My husband and the owner planned to motor the boat to marina Wednesday morning, it would take 3 hours.
Finding the marina was quite easy. Once my husband got back on Monday from a drive to home and back, we decided to plan out the week. By this time, we had moved passed our argument (not sure what we were arguing for, just nervous I guess) and set Tuesday to find a marina. Luckily, we had traveled quite a bit around the sound to know what each area looked like. We visited several marinas on Tuesday and decided on the marina nearest the haul out, a marina we had been to before, which had lots of amenities. The other marinas were too far, or not so nice, and very industrial. We wanted a marina that could offer a family options while living aboard. We know that this will be a temporary living arrangement, like our spring board to get us ready, but we want it to be tolerable.
Wednesday the owner and my husband took off in the boat, those lucky dogs. Me and our son drove to the marina and met them, we fell more in love with this boat. We were so excited to see them pulling into the marina, and could not wait to get this stuff over and sail away.
Thursday the surveyors inspected her and had her hauled out. My husband negotiated some more with owner because there are some issues, he dropped 1,000 off the price. We sat inside her for a couple hours after the survey contemplating the work needed, the size, the price, and our plans. My husband called the owner and set a time to exchange money for the boat on Friday, and see if he could help us get her in our new slip.
Friday we met the owner, exchanged the money and he easily slipped the boat into our new slip. Later that day, we learned our boat was too big for the slip and that we needed to move it the next day. Our novice experience of moving boats in tight areas had us somewhat worried. We cleaned a bunch of stuff out of the boat that night, when we left the marina to head back to our hotel, we noticed how peaceful the marina was. Looked up and saw a million stars, walked around and heard wildlife, we thought to ourselves this is nice.
Saturday morning our new marina community was very welcoming. We got offers to help jump the engine. My husband started moving the boat while our son and I ate a snack, the fellow boater neighbors helped him tie the boat into the new slip. They even gave our son a new life jacket, we had left home without one, and the one he was wearing was too big.
We had to leave and come home to finish downsizing. And now we cannot wait to go back!
We talked all night about what we liked and did not like, then we went and saw her again the next day. It was business this time, we spoke to a surveyor and started talking money. The owner was pretty set on his price 26,500, he did go down to 25,000. We shook on the price and pending the survey, then left this was on Saturday.
My husband and I got into a big argument on Sunday, he drove home to get the money and more stuff. On Monday, we called and scheduled for marinas, survey, and haul out for Thursday, told owner we would need boat at marina by Wednesday. My husband and the owner planned to motor the boat to marina Wednesday morning, it would take 3 hours.
Finding the marina was quite easy. Once my husband got back on Monday from a drive to home and back, we decided to plan out the week. By this time, we had moved passed our argument (not sure what we were arguing for, just nervous I guess) and set Tuesday to find a marina. Luckily, we had traveled quite a bit around the sound to know what each area looked like. We visited several marinas on Tuesday and decided on the marina nearest the haul out, a marina we had been to before, which had lots of amenities. The other marinas were too far, or not so nice, and very industrial. We wanted a marina that could offer a family options while living aboard. We know that this will be a temporary living arrangement, like our spring board to get us ready, but we want it to be tolerable.
Wednesday the owner and my husband took off in the boat, those lucky dogs. Me and our son drove to the marina and met them, we fell more in love with this boat. We were so excited to see them pulling into the marina, and could not wait to get this stuff over and sail away.
Thursday the surveyors inspected her and had her hauled out. My husband negotiated some more with owner because there are some issues, he dropped 1,000 off the price. We sat inside her for a couple hours after the survey contemplating the work needed, the size, the price, and our plans. My husband called the owner and set a time to exchange money for the boat on Friday, and see if he could help us get her in our new slip.
Friday we met the owner, exchanged the money and he easily slipped the boat into our new slip. Later that day, we learned our boat was too big for the slip and that we needed to move it the next day. Our novice experience of moving boats in tight areas had us somewhat worried. We cleaned a bunch of stuff out of the boat that night, when we left the marina to head back to our hotel, we noticed how peaceful the marina was. Looked up and saw a million stars, walked around and heard wildlife, we thought to ourselves this is nice.
Saturday morning our new marina community was very welcoming. We got offers to help jump the engine. My husband started moving the boat while our son and I ate a snack, the fellow boater neighbors helped him tie the boat into the new slip. They even gave our son a new life jacket, we had left home without one, and the one he was wearing was too big.
We had to leave and come home to finish downsizing. And now we cannot wait to go back!
Monday, March 11, 2013
The new boat
Yes, we purchased the boat on our last trip. Thank goodness. We were so ready. And we got it from craiglist, our favorite medium for buying and selling.
She is a beauty, a Westsail 32, 41.2' over all with huge bow-spirit and stern.
She will need a new name with a nice ceremony. She needs some maintenance, she's leaky all over and musty below. She's gonna take a lot of time and cash, but in the end I believe she will be worth it. She'll take us to places we never thought we could go to, and it will be possible with her.
She is a beauty, a Westsail 32, 41.2' over all with huge bow-spirit and stern.
She will need a new name with a nice ceremony. She needs some maintenance, she's leaky all over and musty below. She's gonna take a lot of time and cash, but in the end I believe she will be worth it. She'll take us to places we never thought we could go to, and it will be possible with her.
Head, to compost or not to compost?
We are looking into this, they are expensive, but quite possibly the best thing since sliced bread.
The thought of urine and feces in a tank on your boat grosses me out. And having to repair it grosses me out even more. However, the thought of feces in a medium like moss doesn't gross me out as much, probably, because as a girl who has camped in primitive areas I know how to use the potty outdoors.
In the interest of time and necessity, we have just ordered our composting head and will install it on our new boat soon, yes the boat we just purchased a few days ago. There are some dilemmas with the head on our new boat, the biggest being that there is no holding tank and the marina we have placed it in requires just that, a holding tank. The composting head would operate as a holding tank, it has one for urine and one for feces.
I've never really operated a head, so I'm about to learn. And neither of us have used a composting head. We've watched the video on how to install it and how it operates, and read some reviews online. This is something completely new we are getting ready to explore, potty on a boat. It is pretty important to know how to do this (especially when children are young - getting them out of diapers is a huge hurdle), and it is the first official thing we have bought for our new boat.
Its gonna be interesting, we'll have to teach the children how to use the potty in a different way, pee with valve closed and poop with valve open.
The thought of urine and feces in a tank on your boat grosses me out. And having to repair it grosses me out even more. However, the thought of feces in a medium like moss doesn't gross me out as much, probably, because as a girl who has camped in primitive areas I know how to use the potty outdoors.
In the interest of time and necessity, we have just ordered our composting head and will install it on our new boat soon, yes the boat we just purchased a few days ago. There are some dilemmas with the head on our new boat, the biggest being that there is no holding tank and the marina we have placed it in requires just that, a holding tank. The composting head would operate as a holding tank, it has one for urine and one for feces.
I've never really operated a head, so I'm about to learn. And neither of us have used a composting head. We've watched the video on how to install it and how it operates, and read some reviews online. This is something completely new we are getting ready to explore, potty on a boat. It is pretty important to know how to do this (especially when children are young - getting them out of diapers is a huge hurdle), and it is the first official thing we have bought for our new boat.
Its gonna be interesting, we'll have to teach the children how to use the potty in a different way, pee with valve closed and poop with valve open.
More boats, to live in a trailer or not live in a trailer
Next round of boats, we have a smaller list to see this next visit. We have 2 in particular that we like, Ohlson 38 and Westsail 32. They are very different boats, so it will be interesting to see how they look inside and out. And both are in our price range, with time/work/money we expect to get it running in good shape.
Traveling to see boats is costing us a lot of money. Each time we head to the coast we have to stay in a hotel, at 70-80$ per night, this adds up. Eating out cost more money, and stomach pains. Driving to various marinas adds more money. Occasional sight seeing adds more to the money spending. We are feeling the uneasiness of spending money after we have spent the last year saving for our adventure. Soon the plans and dreams of this adventure will be reality and we cannot wait.
A trailer, or camper, to get us from the house to boat is a thought. Then there is the task of finding a trailer that is decent, licensed, and the gas to move it about. We envision once we are on the boat then we would have to sell it and that could take up some time and money. I think we decided not to do a trailer/camper as a transition, just too much hassle!
Traveling to see boats is costing us a lot of money. Each time we head to the coast we have to stay in a hotel, at 70-80$ per night, this adds up. Eating out cost more money, and stomach pains. Driving to various marinas adds more money. Occasional sight seeing adds more to the money spending. We are feeling the uneasiness of spending money after we have spent the last year saving for our adventure. Soon the plans and dreams of this adventure will be reality and we cannot wait.
A trailer, or camper, to get us from the house to boat is a thought. Then there is the task of finding a trailer that is decent, licensed, and the gas to move it about. We envision once we are on the boat then we would have to sell it and that could take up some time and money. I think we decided not to do a trailer/camper as a transition, just too much hassle!
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