Floating on the water is where we want to be

When you own a home there are regular chores.  Mow the yard, change the air conditioning filter, wash the windows, etc.  Same thing when you live on a boat, but wetter.  When you live on a boat the chore of mowing the lawn morphs into scraping the barnacles and algae off the hull.  And it's best done monthly.  Less frequently than mowing, and a lot wetter.

I take care of mowing the lawn now, so it just made sense that I would flip that upside down and take care of scraping the hull; when we got one.

Scraping the hull requires full immersion into the water.  That requires a whole new way of breathing.  Scuba gear is required.  To get scuba tanks filled, you need to be Scuba Certified.  No problem!

We both passed the online scuba course.  The online course outlines five gazillion things that can go wrong and teaches the skills you need to safely get out of the water alive.  

Sitting in front of a computer, taking the online class, it seemed pretty easy.  Every lesson included beautiful video of divers calmly doing everything right.  Relaxing music and muted bubbles played behind the announcer's engaging Austrailian accent.  

At the end of each lesson, the beautiful, young divers are shown smiling and joking on deck; not a care in the world.  They made it look so easy!  

We were promised that our first breath underwater would be unforgettable.  And mine was!  

Unlike the online videos, the sound of the bubbles is not muted and relaxing.  It's deafeningly loud and super scary.  Suddenly the same primal instincts that helped me fail the Red Cross swimming course about 50 years ago came rushing back.  

Back when I was eight years old (and again when I was nine) while attempting to learn how to swim, they told me to blow the air out of my lungs when my face was under water.  Under water!  Expel the air in your lungs while you're under water!  That's nuts!  Even at that young age, I knew this was just not smart!  I wouldn't comply. I didn't get a certificate (twice).

Then there was the time when I was about 10 years old, jumping in the wild surf of the Atlantic Ocean.  I was knocked down by a fierce wave (probably a 2 footer!).  Water filled my mouth and the glug-glug sound of drowning filled my ears as I felt Posiden pull me deeper into his watery realm, my belly dragged along the gritty sand, my outstretched arms grabbed for something - anything to stop this 60 mile an hour journey to my death!  

Finally!  I grabbed onto something solid and very soon I felt the sun on my back and heard the sea gulls overhead.  I also heard a man's voice, "Are you OK, sweetie?"  

I opened my eyes and looked at the hairy ankle of a total stranger.  How embarrassing!  Fighting a strong desire to get up and hide, I let him help me up and I ran the ten feet to our family's blanket on the beach.

In the Dive Shop's dive training pool all these harrowing experiences and more kicked in, commanding my nose and lungs to disregard the instructions I learned online.    

Scuba training video: "Breathe slowly and don't hold your breath."

In the scary water, my reptilian brain ignites a primal panic that causes my breathing rate to increase generating increasingly shallow breaths that are exhaled through my nose causing my mask to flood.  

Scuba training video: "Calm down.  Breath slowly."  

Whoosh, I stand up.  I can't.  I simply can't talk myself into it!  

With my head out of the water, I gaze longingly at all the friendly air I can enjoy any way I please - through my mouth, my nose, or both simultaneously.  And I don't even have to think about it!

Just like the nice hairy-legged gentleman from my childhood, the instructor pops his head out of the water and asks if I'm all right.  He assures me that I can take my time, and he'll even let me swallow all the water in the pool if I have to.  He tells me there's no need to keep up with the rest of the class.  I nod and give him the OK sign. (you have to learn a lot of hand signals because you can't talk underwater.  So I thought I would at least demonstrate proficiency in that skill.  I didn't want him to think I was a total idiot!)

I've got hundreds of dollars invested in this.  And we need to be able to dive to live on a boat!  Right!?  So now the thrifty side of me kicks in.  I know I'm not gonna get a refund.  I gather myself and go down again where the instructor is demonstrating how to recover your regulator, should it happen to come out of your mouth.  And this is important because a regulator delivers air to your mouth from the tank strapped on your back.

Dropping the regulator must happen a lot because it's the first skill you have to demonstrate proficiency in!  Whenever your regulator is out of your mouth you have to blow tiny bubbles out of your lips so your lungs don't explode!  (this is especially important when you're below 10 feet, so they make you practice it until it's second nature). 

Blow bubbles under water?  Are you nuts?  I need that air.  Even the Red Cross couldn't teach me to do that!  My reptilian brain brings on primal panic again!  Up I sputter.  

Once again, the instructor joins me above the water and assures me I can stay in the shallow end and practice this skill before I move on to the next skill.  (Which is getting water out of a flooded mask by blowing air out of my nose under water.  The same nose I'm not supposed to exhale from when there's no water in my mask.) 

For the next two hours, Jerry and the other four people in the class are demonstrating all kinds of skills like how to share air, what if feels like to have a completely empty tank of air while you're ten feet under, how to play with the buoyancy of the dive equipment, how to swim from 30 feet down with no air and get to the top without having your lungs explode.  Important stuff.  

I still can't get my body to override what I've been doing for more than 58 years - breathing!  I decide I'm just not cut out for it.  I decide to walk away from the money and promised adventure back onto dry land.  

Meanwhile, Jerry passes all the skill tests and decides he will move on to the next day's planned open water dive in a Florida spring far, far away.  How far, far away?  Wake up at 4 AM and be at the Dive Shop by 5:15 AM far, far away.  I stay home.

By lunch time, he's texting me with the news that he can't get his ears to equalize - he's been trying all morning.  And this is an important skill because if you can't get the pressure in your ears to equalize then you can lose your hearing.  

We sleep on it and decide maybe we'll go ahead and skip the whole diving thing.  We celebrate the fact that at least we tried and bonus: we now own some great snorkeling equipment.  

So slight change in plans.  Instead of scraping the bottom of the boat ourselves, we'll go ahead and hire someone to do it for us.   Sort of like hiring a lawn care company.  

For a point of reference: the money we spent on the aborted scuba courses would have paid for quite a bit of bottom scraping.  

Good news though - we still have our hearing, intact lungs and lives!  The adventure continues.

We've narrowed it down

We've narrowed it down to a 37' Grand Harbour.  Now we have to narrow down our possessions.  

Even though this Trawler has a ton of room (for a Trawler) - even a FULL-Size refrigerator, we have to minimize.  

I find letting go of so much a freeing and scary proposition.  What do you do with Grandma's teacups?  Sure there are only 2, with matching saucers; and they're pretty, but also pretty useless.  

As a boy, my Dad, who was raised in Maine, used to accompany his sister Mary and Mother Marian, across the Canadian border where she would buy decorative teacups and saucers.  She had quite a collection going and enjoyed hosting parties at her house.  

I imagine she and her friends played cards, then stopped for dessert and coffee or tea and used these teacups. No one was checking their phones... but I'm sure they were catching each other up on neighborhood news and enjoying each other's company.  Old-timey Facebook!

Dad also told me that his Mom pressed him and his sister to conceal the teacups and saucers in the clothing they were wearing when they crossed the border back to America... probably to avoid paying taxes.  These teacups and saucers are rascally and from this story, I inferred they had enough - perhaps more than enough as there was money to buy these indulgences! 

My dear cousin Enga sent the teacups to me when her Mom, Mary passed on.  Aunt Mary had inherited the teacups from Grandma Marian.  When Enga got them she felt it was right and good to pass some along to Dad's side of the family.  I was very happy to have them and remember the story Dad enjoyed telling us about smuggling the teacups across the border.

My Mother (who grew up in Ohio) gave me a teapot that her mother, Grace, had gotten as a bonus for selling things door to door during the Great Depression.  Mom also told me how she and her twin brothers felt pressed to help Grace tend a vacant lot in the neighborhood to raise food that would be preserved so the family could sustain itself through the winter.  From this story, I inferred that they never had enough.

So now I have a teapot from one Grandma to go with the teacups from the other Grandma.  It's practically a collection!  

And it's too much!  I can't take them with me when I live on a boat.  One good wave and they'd come crashing down.  I'll be offering them to my brothers' and their wives.  

These pictures and the stories about my parents' families will be plenty to hold onto.  No space required!  

Creating and collecting memories we can share with loved ones and others... those are probably our most precious possessions and you can cram billions and billions of them onto any sized boat.  

As part of this paring down, I'll be digitizing and posting family pictures (someone else will have to hold onto the originals in their photo albums).  I'm looking forward to the journey down memory lane as I compile them and share them with family members.  

The flood of stories I remember by doing that may be enough to fill an ocean, but not enough to swamp the largest tanker or even a 37-foot Trawler with lots of storage space.  

First things first: pare down the non-essentials!  Then onto the practical things... clothes, kitchen items, etc.

I'll let you know which one is harder for me.  Which would be harder for you?

Sam

The search evolves!

Well, we thought we had narrowed down the manufacturer and models of trawlers we were going to concentrate on but that changed recently.  We were able to visit a Kadey Krogen 42, and it seems OK, but we are not totally sure that it will work for us.  We still haven't been aboard a KK 39, but plan to take a road trip soon to check those out.

As I mentioned, we stumbled across another possible trawler model to explore when we came across the Great Harbour N37.  Only 21 of them were made, all in Gainesville, Florida by Mirage Manufacturing and launched in nearby Green Cove Springs.  Great Harbor owners seem very loyal to their choice of trawlers, and there are a mix of owners who purchased new from Mirage as well as previously loved vessels.

We are looking forward to continuing our search and learning as much as we can by reading blogs and forums of trawler owners.

Until next time!

Jerry

We're just CLODs

Cruisers Living On Dirt - our whole lives, we've been CLODs.  This isn't the first time we've considered a live-aboard cruising life.  Back in 2005 we learned how to sail with the American Sailing Association and discovered that a 40' sailboat just wasn't big enough to hold our marriage together.

Then we discovered a class of ship called Cruising Trawlers - or rather, Jerry discovered them.  I was content to rent a boat whenever we wanted to go out.  Might be a canoe, or a deep sea head boat or anything in between.  Might have a captain or a guide or we might be bareboating.  

As he shared his growing vision, I learned with him; and feared all the things that can and do go wrong.  Then, after taking a hands-on course with Captain Bob's Trawler school, we rented Sandollars, a Mainship 390 for a few days.  

Plenty of room - very modern - and we even made a mistake that caused Sandollars engine to quit.  We were dead in the water!  We were also happily anchored in gorgeous weather and just a phone call away from meeting the friendly Sea Tow captain who brought us safely back to harbor.

We got through that with great humor.  So now that I'm convinced our marriage would survive and even thrive aboard Tanuki - the boat we've named, but we don't yet own, well I'm practicing living aboard.

I've started to put away things I don't use very often, especially in the kitchen - or galley, as the food prep area of a boat is known.  I've started planning and executing menus that will work well on a boat (not a lot of energy used cooking).  I've started really watching how much water I use to prepare foods and wash up afterward.  

After I finish reading "Storing Foods without Refrigeration" by Carolyn at TheBoatGalley.com, I'll start using those methods too.  There will be refrigeration on Tanuki - just not a lot of it.

We've met many cruisers.  By and large they are a fun group of people with a sense of adventure and an even bigger sense of humor.  As a CLOD, I can play Jimmy Buffet music in the background as I practice the live-aboard lifestyle as we search for the floating condo that will be named MV Tanuki.

Sam 

We have named the boat we don't own yet!

It's finally the right time for us to take the plunge and move part time aboard a cruising trawler!

We have been studying and chartering cruising trawlers enough to make us think we may eventually sell our land based home and live aboard full time.

We have been looking at various trawlers online, and have cruised aboard two about the same size (40-45') we are looking at for several days each.  For now we are focusing on two Kadey Krogen models we think we will like, the 42 and 39 raised pilot house designs, have joined the Kadey Krogen owners group as "wannabes" and are putting a few things in order here on land before buying the boat.  We haven't been on a KK 39 or 42 yet, and are eager to look at both.

If everything goes according to our plan, we will be seriously shopping and ready to make an offer and close by mid summer of this year.  Depending on when and where the boat is located, as well as any pre-liveaboard modifications we may want to make, we hope to move aboard and spend most of our time the rest of the summer and early fall North of North Carolina until November brings an end to hurricane season here in St. Augustine, FL, where we live.

If, after several months, we are certain we like the live aboard lifestyle, we will probably list our home for sale and live aboard full time following the most pleasant weather up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the US and around the Gulf of Mexico, The Bahamas and the islands of the Caribbean until we find we can't or don't want to live aboard anymore.  We also are seriously considering the Great Loop at least once, taking our time and allowing up to a full year to do it!

The plan is for the first few blogs to record our preparations and boat search, so they may be infrequent for a while.  We hope to keep the blog up to date with our travels and adventures after that, with both of us posting from our different perspectives.

If you are following, welcome aboard!

Jerry