HELP FROM ABOVE ...

And below:

Manteo, NC -- Our friend Pete helping us with electronics installation. He'll be continuing his help from above and below while we drive to the Annapolis sailboat show.

Thanks, Pete!!!

SWEEPING CHANGES

Manteo, NC -- I've been looking for the perfect broom to sweep our very small stretch of wood floor in the boat.

My dreams came true at Walmart yesterday. As we were standing in line to pay for our basil plant, sewing thread and ledger book, I spotted the Slipper Genie!

Thanks to Oprah, the genies might be familiar to those who have television, but to me they were a shocking revelation.

Brilliant.

Perfect.

Cue the music!

BEST BAR IN TOWN

Chip bought a boat-friendly guitar, a Little Martin. Since it's made of mostly composite materials, it's resistant to changing temperature and humidity. It's supposed to hold its tuning -- so far so good!

AND THE NEXT 12 YEARS...

Manteo, NC -- Today is our 12th anniversary. I decided it was time to tell Chip the truth, something I'd been hiding, avoiding, skirting, making light of for a long time now.

At brunch, I swallowed hard and came out with it:

"I don't want to go north."

"Really? Me either!"

Well, happy anniversary to us, because now that we decided we can just head south -- where we REALLY want to go -- we are jacked up.

I pulled out all the Bahamas and ICW guides. We bought a Caribbean travel guide.

YAHOO!!!!!! Now THAT'S cause for celebration.

Crystal clear turquoise water, here we come...

TUFTING

Manteo, NC -- It finally came. Our wonderful mattress topper that makes the V-berth bed feel like a mattress.

After making fun of their ad for the last five years:

It seemed only fitting to make our own:

p.s. -- Chip asked me to add: That is NOT me in the first photo. That is the ad for the topper. Chip did not ask me to add this: That IS Chip in the second photo.

GOING SOLAR

The solar panels. They arrived today!!!!

Two big ones that will be over the bimini, one of each side.

And a little guy that fits between the backstays -- or will when that rack is built.

BACK IN THE SADDLE

Manteo, NC -- We're feeling a bit wistful on returning to an empty beach. Our kids, Casey and Dylan (and Brett!), left for college while we were in New Mexico. We had hoped to be here to send them off. Instead, once we get things situated here, we'll be heading west again, this time to Asheville and Boone.

In the meantime, we're hard at the last-minute preparations for our watery departure, the one that has now been delayed by at least three weeks.

The big items on our short TO DO list:

--Order the Tufted Topper for our bed
--Get solar panels and install them
--Buy and install electronic navigation equipment
--Fix the water filter
--Sort out my folding bike

For that first item, we had to cut a pattern in the shape of our mattress. That sounds easy, right? Few things associated with boats are easy. Since there's no space big enough to lay the mattress out on the boat, we had to get it off the boat and onto the dock. Fortunately we were able to manage this without dunking either the mattress or ourselves, although not without making ourselves look silly. The pattern is now wending its way to get us a poofy pad to soften our sleep. So long aching shoulder!

Our work was done in time to avoid this:

OUR OWN LITTLE HEAVEN

Albuquerque, NM -- We found it. The store of our dreams.

Okay, maybe that's an overstatement, but we often walk through entire stores without seeing anything relevant to our lives, usually leaving without buying anything.

And then we went to REI. First there was the bike department. Then the backpacks and bags, and then the high-tech fiber clothing and then the hats with UV protection. A few hours and several hundred dollars later, we came out with that amazing bike tool, which has everything we don't know how to use to repair our bikes, two tire patch kits, a little bike saddle bag that fits under the seat, a couple of hats, a foldup Sherpani backpack, a computer bag for Chip....

Mom's been released from the hospital now. She's making quick progress. Hospitals are no place to get well. We're all staying in a hotel, still taking turns mom-watching, spending the remainder of the time that we're not at REI with my nephew and his awesome family. It's unplanned family time and perhaps more precious for that.

Cruising offers us more time to spend with our families, but otherwise takes us so very far away from them.

GRILL SARGEANT

The new, undamaged grill has finally arrived, the grill we've been admiring at the boat show for 8 years.

One more thing checked off the list. We now have a second kitchen in the cockpit.

Mom continues to have complications and procedures, far away in New Mexico. Every day, every hour her condition changes.

We check flights. We make checklists for leaving the boat. Then we wait.

And grill in the cockpit.

MAKING MUSIC

For the last three months, we've been stuck with old technology on the music front, since the stereo on the boat did not have an input to play music from our iPod.

After that long slog of putting all our CDs onto the iPod a few years ago, we were down to one CD that actually belonged to Dylan: Nickel Creek's Nickel Creek album. Now, I love Nickel Creek, but one CD for two months was getting REALLY tedious.

So Chip bought a new car stereo for only $59, (why didn't we do this three months ago?) and we toughed through installing it ourselves, a task that could have been ridiculously easy if the billion-wire plug was the same on the old stereo and new. No, of course not, so we spent an hour or so splicing wires while sweating (we had to turn off the power and thus the air conditioning).

Now thanks to technology our musical repertoire has exploded without taking up an entire room.

Thankfully the new stereo has not exploded -- at least so far.

ONE LESS TO DO? BOO HOO.

We fix, we polish, we stow, we order parts, we tilt away at a very long TO DO list that looks like this:

--Fix the water filter

--Get the dinghy motor working

--Fix the hand pump

--Organize the cockpit lockers

--Get the stereo working with the iPod

--Order the grill

--Service the air conditioner
--Clean out the bilge
--Get a P.O. box

--Research electronics

--Sell cars...

You get the idea. We're always anxious to scratch something off the list.

We ordered a fantabulous, all stainless Galleymate grill with visions of T-bones in Manteo, mahi-mahi in Hopetown dancing in our heads -- and marking "order the grill" off our list.

The grill arrived last week while we were at the boatyard. Our anticipation was so great, we had already bought the first meal to cook on it. Alas, it looked like this:

Boo.

Boo hoo.

Remove "order the grill" from the list. Add:
--Box up grill and take to UPS
--Wait for new grill to arrive

[Insert your own trite phrase about forward progress here.]

TOOLING AROUND

With parts sorted and stowed (except for that one bin), today was tool time. We bought some soft-sided tool bags at Home Depot, forever liberating ourselves from those cumbersome plastic tool boxes that fall apart, or worse, open at inopportune moments. Besides, the soft-sided ones conform better to boat life -- and boat hatches.

The tools worked themselves into fairly obvious categories: wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, etc., and my favorite category, "McGyver tools." Things like a telescoping magnet, weird grabby tweasers for picking up small objects in hard-to-reach places, a bendy screwdriver and a telescoping mirror for those impossible to see spaces.

Everything went without incident into the three bags leaving us with a short list of items glaringly missing from our arsenal, like flat screwdrivers and wire snippers.

The tiny things went into tackle boxes:

Whew. These lazy days.

THE SUM OF OUR PARTS

"What do you guys DO now?"

"Stow stuff," doesn't really tell the story, but that photo does. Would you just look at that?

Today, we pulled out all the parts we have inherited from the previous owners of Good Company and all the parts we ourselves have accumulated from our previous two boats.

The job at hand went something like this:

1. Divide parts into sensible categories.
2. Find appropriate bins to hold each category.
3. Find an appropriate place to stow each bin.
4. Remember where we put everything.

We started with the easiest category: Sailing hardware. Picking through the mound like gleaners, we slowly pulled out all the shackles, D-rings, blocks and the other little doodads that we sailors love to have in our toy box. Then we snuggled them down nicely in one of the dozen or so fully locking bins purchased for this extravaganza.

The next round we pulled out the electrical paraphernalia, then light bulbs, then adhesives and sealants, category after category, bin after bin.

You know how when you move, the first round of boxes are so organized and focused? Each box has a label like "books" or "photo albums," "kitchen utensils," or "office supplies." Then you come to the end and there's a box with five paper clips, a baseball, two envelopes, a single mitten, a ragged road map, a plastic lid, a thesaurus, a squeegee and a hot pink crayon.

That's how our day ended. We now have one bin with random things like a piece of Lexan, three gas struts, a cabinet latch, four plastic cups that we can't quite identify but are afraid to get rid of them lest we find out, a dozen wooden plugs and other disparate items that defy categorization.

But that, my friends, is a bin for another day.

YOUR MOM

It's transportation week on Good Company. Now that the folding bikes are in the fold, and soon to be in the hold, it's time to get the dinghy working.

We lowered 'er off the davits and into the water. She was looking a little depressed, so Chip pumped some air in to keep her afloat.

I missed the operation, but Chip somehow got the motor off the bracket on the stern rail onto the dinghy transom without dropping it in the water, which is exactly what I would have done.

A couple of pulls on the handle/rope/pulling thingy (what's that called?) and, well, nothing. About a hundred pulls later, still no firing.

Chip says there are several things to try before we call in professionals, so we're still grounded, sort of, if you can be both afloat and grounded at the same time.

OVER THE EDGE

We arrived in Rock Hall at Good Company today hoping to find her ready to go in the water -- or perhaps already there.

A big NO on that. The boatyard had not yet replaced the strike plate on our newly finished toe rails. The packing gland had not been repacked. Never underestimate the value of being there, face-to-face, OR bringing along a free Chip's t-shirt to the yard manager.

We left to eat lunch and run through our shopping list at West Marine. That run-through cost a whopping $735, but if you're ever planning on visiting us onboard, we bought you two really nice life jackets on sale @ $119. Cheap for saving our lives this month and your life on down the water. (Instead of spending the $250 times two on offshore life jackets with harnesses, we decided to buy the less expensive in-shore versions. We'll drop the $$$ on the other ones once we're close to going "offshore.")

Back at the boatyard, we found this:

We're in the water -- and without me fretting and freaking as the put her in the travelift, drove her a block and dumped her in. Just as well.

It'll be this spot overnight, and a run up the mast by the boatyard to fix some lights in the morning.

We're in the water! It's official.

HOME IS WHERE THE BOAT IS

Last Sunday when we arrived in Rock Hall, we carried the Froli bed springs from the car, up the ladder, over the transom and into Good Company. Frolis are plastic springs made to go under the cushions on a boat to take the place of box springs. You assemble a base that adjusts to the odd shape of your bed, and then attach the springs, different colors represent differing firmness, so you make it soft under your shoulders (me) or firm under your hips (Chip). It's sort of the cheap, marine version of the Dial-a-Bed.

Since we bought those springs -- at the Annapolis Boat Show in 2007 -- we moved them into Isabella, out of Isabella, to the beach apartment, to the rental house, and now, finally, into Good Company.

And Sunday, as I was hunkered down in the v-berth, hooking little plastic pieces together, I asked myself, "Why am I so friggin' happy?"

My self snapped back, "Well, duh! You've been totally disassembling your life for the last three years. Now you have finally started rebuilding."

And, damn, if my self wasn't right. I was experiencing utter joy at having turned the corner and plopped right down in my new life. My days of tearing apart and breaking down are behind me.

Now, I am home. Cleaning, building, nesting. Finally.

And when I finished assembling little plastic wheels and springs, I had exactly one left over. A perfect fit.

BAG LADY

We're about to become liveaboards, the bane of society. Just as people who live in houses don't want neighbors who live in cars, people who live near marinas don't want neighbors who live in boats. 

In fact, marinas call the space for people like us, "transient docks."

Our segment of society, "the liveaboards," are infamous for messy housekeeping. We have all kinds of flotsam tied to our decks, like bikes, water cans and surfboards. We're known to do despicable things like hang laundry from the lifelines and steal toilet paper. We are the unkempt, unwashed derelicts, the unshaven vagabonds, the squatters, yes, the undesirables.

Everyone thinks sailors are adventurous. Alas, we're really just trying to find a place to tie up.

The only difference between me and a bag lady is that my bags are expensive -- and waterproof.

CLOSING IN

We're still tooling along. No more doldrums. (Not yet.)

We've spent hours talking with Michele, studying yachtworld.com, making lists, pricing equipment, debating in-mast furling. We're proud of our thoughtful approach, our steady hand at the helm. We're not in a hurry. It's a big decision, this, but we're progressing with confidence.

Geography matters. There's a great boat in Ecuador that we'd love to have, but Ecuador? There's another in Antigua that Michele and I are angling to have a look at, because, well, it's December and the boat is in Antigua. But we can't deny the thousands of dollars the location would add to the cost of the boat.

Features matter. The New York boat has a top-of-the-line watermaker. Rock Hall boat has a Zodiac 6-person life raft.

TO FURL OR NOT TO FURL

We are studying all the IP380s on the market. We're pretty sure we want a traditional main (raise and lower manually) v. in-mast furling (the ones that roll-up inside the mast like a roll of paper towels).

PROS:
in-mast
--will presumably hold their value better
--ease of use
--more on the market

traditional
--more reliable
--can get a better price right now
--hey, it's called traditional, because they've been in use for centuries

CONS:
in-mast
--failure is pretty catastrophic, because...
--failure is likely to be when it's blowing stink and you really need that main furled. Really.
--cost more

traditional
--will likely depreciate faster

FOOTNOTE: Driving back to the Outer Banks, we stopped just off Highway 13 in Cape Charles, north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on the eastern shore. Chip had read about it as a good sailing destination. On a quiet Wednesday night, we stumbled upon the only place open, the only bar in town, Kelly's Gingernut Pub, in a brick bank building built in 1906. The food was good, the beer list awesome, the place quaint. We'll definitely make that a stop on some future Chesapeake cruise ... Our charmed week continues.

BOAT UNITS ...

... not to be confused with boat drinks.

We made a list this week of all the add-ons we might want on our cruising boat. By the time we finished, it added up to a staggering $56,000.00. Shudder.

A friend of ours has come up with a brilliant scheme for softening the blow of throwing buckets of money at her boat: expenditures are now measured in Boat Units.

One Boat Unit = $1000.00.

Using this unit of measure, our wish list is magically transformed into a reasonable 56 Boat Units. At that price, we might add a cute little spinnaker and a sexy boot stripe to the list.