So What About the Boat?
It’s a good thing we love Turkey because some days it feels like we may never leave. What we thought would be fairly simple (you know, new room configurations, turning a bathroom into a shower, installing all new electronics - NBD - ha!) was really a massive overhaul both cosmetic and technical, and as with all boats, included constant troubleshooting along the way. Russ, seeing the bright side, kept saying, “Well, it’s great we took down every single wall and ceiling panel because now we know what’s behind them!”
We finally moved onto the boat at the beginning of March, which was, at minimum, a month or two months past the initial and revised and re-revised projections. We lived at the dock while work was finished, then started and finished again, and we finally went to anchor a week later. Just leaving the dock was a game of starts and stops, testing our patience and teaching us all the different alarms that may start sounding at any second. There are so many possible causes for alarm, they have their own screen.
We moved to anchor and enjoyed a couple days of boat life before the coast guard boarded us asking for documents. We were waiting on the final few from changing the port of registry so we were promptly sent back to the dock with instructions not to leave until we had them. (Getting papers is a boring blog I will not write whereby we were told about fifty different things, some or none of which might be true, making plans to leave the country but then we didn’t have to leave and then we couldn’t leave because we’ve already overstayed our visa and in the end papers were apostiilled and sent and received without ever leaving the dock and somehow it’s all fine.)
In spite of a lengthy survey and even extra in-depth checks prior to purchase, something happens nearly each time we want to sail, and on the days when no alarm sounds, the weather doesn’t quite cooperate. The list of things we’ve fixed, overhauled, upgraded, updated, refurbished, maintained and replaced goes on and on. This is not surprising on a new-to-us boat yet it never ceases to surprise me how many things need money thrown at them. And guess what? The only hope for the future is that once we know the boat, we will just know in which direction to throw money faster.
All that said (in a lighthearted and humorous tone that is fully accepting of and excited about boat life), Big EmOceans is wonderful, we love the changes we made to her and we’re enjoying being at home on the water. We may never leave.
sail
verb
gerund or present participle: sailing
travel in a boat with sails, especially as a sport or recreation.
"Ian took us out sailing on the lake."
travel by ship on or across (a sea) or on (a route).
"Plastic ships could be sailing the oceans soon."
owning a vessel into which one pours money, time and resources without ever changing locations.
“Jess and Russ are sailing around the world.”
