Upgrades for Lightheart and Her Crew

Saturday Oct 9
We are getting ready to take off into the great blue, and it’s unbelievably daunting – and expensive. Our boat has been down in Marathon, in the Keys, for over a month now getting upgraded to prepare for our Caribbean “walkabout.” We’ve been driving the 2.5 hour trek back and forth a couple of times a week, as well as working on the boat while we’re there. We’re commuting like this because I decided to work as much as I possibly can between now and November to build the cruising kitty. Peter brings me back to Miami to catch a plane, then drives back down and works, then comes and picks me up and we both drive down and work. Rinse and repeat. It’s become exhausting. The boat is now finally ready to bring home (a 2-day sail), but we’ve had strong north winds most of this week, and we’re waiting for them (and the resultant seas) to lay down a bit before we sail. It’s given us a couple of days’ breather here at home, which has been lovely – all the moreso because we’re having gorgeous fall weather, quite cool and dry by Miami standards. We’ll probably head back down this afternoon or tomorrow, spend a day getting Lightheart cleaned up, and then sail home.

We chose Marathon because THE solar guy is there (http://www.saltservice.net ), and that’s part of what we’ve had installed – 2 135-watt panels that so far are generating more than enough power for us – we can actually run the fridge all the time! That will change life aboard immensely. We’ve also installed a reverse osmosis desalinating watermaker, so no more trips ashore to bring back water in plastic bottles. In the Bahamas, we spent an inordinate amount of time getting water, and then of course there was no good way to dispose of (and certainly not to recycle) the plastic bottles…and it was often $4 a gallon…so this is a thrilling turn of events! We also have installed single sideband radio, which is a marine version of ham radio – almost essential for getting good weather information when we are at sea. We also can do email via SSB, as well as having really excellent emergency communication should that become necessary. Our upgrades are now complete EXCEPT for the learning curve required to operate the stuff, which is enormous – especially the single sideband. And on top of that, we got a new laptop for the boat in order to support a new fancy schmancy navigation software, so my brain is bulging and buzzing with all it must learn. Occasionally it just shuts down in protest.

While the learning curve is an ongoing thing, the next step, of course, will be disentangling ourselves from land, which may prove to be far more daunting a task than readying Lightheart…at least it’s harder to decide WHAT to do. We’d love to sublet our place so that we could leave our mailing address here and so that, in the unlikely event we decide to come back, we’d still have this extraordinary little place. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, so we’ve got to figure out where to store our stuff, how to handle mail, how to handle business and financial dealings that continue whether we’re here or not, what to do with our car, etc. And we’ve got to do it quickly – our ideal departure date is right around Thanksgiving because we want to get south before the cold fronts start marching through. They will cause untold delays and headaches (we experienced PLENTY of unseasonably late fronts in the Bahamas, and each one of them held us up for 3 days to a week), so we want to get south of where they’re likely to be before they do. So all in all, between boat work and land work, it seems like I just have to put my head down and keep pushing through until we finally let go of that last dockline and sing “free at last, free at last, great God almighty, we’re free at last!”.