Casting Off!

We’ve been planning this day for over a decade–the day when we finally set sail in our beloved boat, all restored and upgraded to be exactly what we dreamed of sailing around the world.

Worries

I have to admit, throwing off the bowlines is a lot harder than I expected. Gravity pulls hard when you’re getting ready to leave the dock in your home port. So many things to think about, worry about. The big questions: Is the boat ready? Are we ready? What have we forgotten?

The reasonable answer is that we are as well prepared as any new cruisers can be. We’ve been cruising seasonally for nearly a decade. We have training and self-study under our belts in offshore medicine, weather forecasting, navigation, and many other topics. We’ve worked hard to get here. We bought the boat a decade ago and sailed her for five seasons before starting the refit. The refit–more than three and a half expensive years of often grueling work–covered absolutely every detail of the boat. There can be no question, she is much better than new, what sailors would call a well found boat–properly prepared and equipped in every respect.

And yet, it’s easy to worry. Will all the new systems work properly? What mistakes did we make? We’re just gardeners, after all. What makes us think we can refit a boat? Back in the boatyard days, a quote posted on the trailer door reminded us, “the sea finds out everything you did wrong.” Leaving the dock submits the boat, and her sailors, to the trial and judgment of the sea.

Provisioning

We’ve stocked up on all the food, spare parts, tools, medical supplies–everything we could possibly think of, and, honestly, more than reasonably fits on the boat. Any yet, there is the worry of something forgotten, a critical spare o-ring, or an engine part, or anything that we might desperately need someday in a part of the world where such a thing just can’t be gotten.

It’s so easy, in Florida, to get anything within a few days. Of course there’s Amazon, and the big marine retailers like Defender and Fisheries Supply. Our favorite local chandlery, Key West Marine Hardware (“Los Cubanitos”). The extraordinary industrial supply shop McMaster-Carr (order by 5pm for delivery the next morning). They have everything! Need a few more gallons of epoxy? Call Raka in Ft. Pierce. These and many others have been our lifelines these past four years. Weaning ourselves from our suppliers is hard.

Now it’s going to be just the two of us and our boat, along with what we have onboard and whatever we are lucky enough to find along the way.

Saying Goodbye

We never thought we would spend five months at a marina less than half a mile from the boatyard. But the punch list was long. There have been so many projects. Honestly, some of them still aren’t done. Truth is, the boat will never really be done. We can’t let that stop us.

The marina has been good to us. We’ve enjoyed it, maybe a little too much. Safe Harbour on Stock Island is a remnant of old Key West–funky, cool and charming but not fancy. It’s an old-school live-aboard marina with an eclectic, artsy vibe. There’s so little left of that in the increasingly gentrified and sanitized Keys.

Our friends and neighbors on the dock have been wonderful. There are a lot of people to say goodbye to. The marina staff would be happy for us to extend another month. We would be happy to stay. But staying means not cruising. Not cruising means staying put for another hurricane season, and, as we get older, that doesn’t feel like a good option. After almost twenty-five years in Key West, it’s time to move on.

And so the day has come, the day when we finally live another quote on the trailer door. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Before I forget, our tracking page is now live.