If you know us at all, you undoubtedly recognize that we love traveling slowly, putting down roots, and getting to know a place. Zipping from one city to the next, with only a day or two to explore, has never been our style. When a place touches our hearts and imaginations, we are inclined to […]
Posts in the Maintenance category:
Never ending boat work.
That’s a Wrap!
If you know us well, you know that subtlety and muted shades are not our jam. We like bold, funky patterns and loud colors. We want our immediate surroundings to be bright and cheerful. We love Ziggy B, but the boat came from the factory in the most boring colors, and it was almost in […]
Fat Bottomed Girl
We have hauled ¡Pura Vida! out of the water several times to work on her bottom, but it has always been done by a boat yard with a sling crane. These beastly contraptions place two or three enormous straps under her hull and gently lift her out of the water. The crane then moves to […]
Something Is Burning
“Something is burning” are three of the most frightening words you can hear someone say on a cruising boat. Those are the exact words Kimberly yelled out a couple of minutes after we had started our engine. She then ran to the cockpit and shut the engine down while I reached for the fire extinguisher. […]
Our Frosty Drawers
It Started With A Stench For years, every time we reached in to our utensil drawer above the refrigerator, or pulled open the large drawer below, our nostrils were assaulted by the unmistakable scent of mold. Attempts to purge the offending odor with vinegar, then bleach, had no effect. We learned to live with it, […]
A (Not Final) Farewell
That dreaded time for cruising sailors was fast approaching – haulout time. A necessary evil of the cruising life is that you periodically must have your home lifted out of the water and placed on stilts. While in this unnatural state for a boat, all types of bottom maintenance can be performed, and ¡Pura Vida! […]
Bimini Blues (The dumbest thing we have done aboard…so far)
I think Kimberly jinxed me by complaining that I always get to write the glamorous entries in the blog. Our return to Bimini was supposed to be an exploration of all the wonderful dive sites we had seen when we first came to the island group in 2001 aboard a Black Beard dive boat. We […]
Water, Crap, and Power
For the record, why do I always get the technical entries, while John-Michael gets to wax poetic about our adventures? He writes about diving into a blue hole on an exotic island and I get to discuss our new poop processing machine. I know it’s rhetorical, but I just had to ask. Returning to the […]
“Stuck” in Paradise
Sticker Shock in Fox Town We decided we couldn’t continue our passage through The Abacos without a stopover in Little Abaco. The first town we visited there was Fox Town. This is a very small, clean, and friendly village that runs along the shoreline to the Sea of Abaco. They have three small grocery stores […]
Florida Keys
Key West After two days at sea, we arrived in Key West from Tarpon Springs earlier than expected, around 4am. We anchored outside the Northwest Channel to await daylight because all the guides tell you to avoid the Key West approaches at night unless you are very familiar with the area. We are so glad […]