When David randomly (at least to me it felt pretty random…) said to me about three years ago, “I think we should get a boat”, I never would have dreamed that three years later we would be celebrating the first day in a year-long adventure on said boat in Ft Lauderdale, Florida. I must admit that when he suggested a year ago that we consider doing the Great Loop, I was at first hesitant – how would we work? where would we do laundry? can we live in small quarters without wanting to kill each other? how will I fit all my clothes and shoes for a year? David is clever though, since he knows that once he’s planted a seed, despite my initial negative gut reactions, once I’ve had a chance to mull things over, I usually come around to his way of thinking :).
And now, here we are, toasting to our first day!
Yesterday evening, we left 50 degree and rainy Seattle on a red-eye and landed this morning in Ft Lauderdale where the weather is sunny and 75 degrees.
We were nervous about getting to the boat as this would be our first time checking out the full impact of the potential damage from shipping. The good news is that everything inside the boat was completely fine. The repaired canvas pieces look great and you can’t even tell that the BBQ railing had snapped completely from the boat. Unfortunately the BBQ itself was mangled beyond repair, so one of our errands today was to get a new one. We also noticed that some of the other canvas was less-obviously damaged, so we’re hemming and hawwing about what to do about those.
After establishing the state of Highwind, we went out for the day provisioning and picking up a few things for repairing our outdoor table that is a little worse for the wear. Costco, WholeFoods, HomeDepot, Harbor Freight, West Marine. I said to David that it is funny how we are about as far as you can be from Seattle, yet we spent the day in the same stores that we would have at home!!
Now we are ending the day with some steaks on our new grill and probably early to bed since we didn’t get much sleep on the plane! Tomorrow, we both will be working from the boat while two different freight shipments arrive throughout the day with the new couch and our last pile of supplies from Kirkland. We’re also starting to look ahead to planning our first transit stages to get north to West Palm Beach by March 6th (where we have flights up to VA for the weekend for a funeral/celebration of life).
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