It’s been a week since SV Sanitas splashed into the water of Tampa Bay after her summer vacation in the boat yard, and I guess I can finally say we’ve moved back aboard. We’ve slept in our tiny V-berth, cooked some simple one-pot meals in the galley, and unpacked box after box after box. At first, I couldn’t figure out why it takes so long to unpack such a small boat, but I think I figured it out – there’s no basement you can stash a pile of boxes in and forget about them for months. Or even years!

The past week has been a reminder that everything takes longer than anticipated when you’re living on a boat. We were scheduled to put Sanitas in the water at 9am last Thursday…. which turned into the last thing before the yard closed at 5:00. So all the things we planned to do in the water (inspect the mainsail, load new and very heavy house batteries, check all the engine systems) moved to Friday morning. Eventually, we got those tasks done and motored the 3 miles from Salt Creek to the St Pete Municipal Marina Friday afternoon and tied up to the transient wall. Since we are staying for a month and because we have a very low freeboard, we’d requested a slip instead of the wall, but no one in the marina office could find the request until sunset. Then we were told come back tomorrow, and we’ll move you into your slip on the West Dock. So instead of having 3 days of overlap between the marina and our apartment to give us plenty of time to move in, we did it all on Saturday: moved everything we’d been living with for the past two months from the apartment to the boat, then moved everything from the storage unit we rented for the summer onto the boat. That’s a lot of stuff! Did it grow and breed over the summer? Suffice it to say, there wasn’t an inch of room to move on little Sanitas.

As Capt. Mike was hiding things away in the storage hold under the bed, I heard him shout, “We have a problem! We have a problem! The hold is filling up with water!” Now I interpreted that as we are sinking, and starting trying to remember where the wooden plugs and the waterproof repair tape got stashed. But luckily (?) it just meant that the hose to the forward water tank was leaking and 45 gallons of water were flooding the place where we had just placed our belongings. I turned on all the taps to take some of the pressure off the hose, unloaded everything back into the cockpit where it had started the day, and we dealt with the mess. Eventually, the tank ran dry, we bailed it out, set up fans, spread out our soggy belongings….. and got a cheap hotel room for the night.

Stuff floating in the “under the bed” storage hold…

Capt. Mike actually fit in the hold while repairing the hose. If you ever wonder where we hide the dead bodies….

Installing protection around the hose fitting, so we don’t do THAT again!

Sunday went much better! We put our bed back together so that sleeping aboard was possible, set up the composting head, and did some more unpacking. Then we rewarded ourselves a day of rest – a visit to Pat and Darby in Siesta Key, and walking over to Vinoy Park to see the Barenaked Ladies in concert at Rib Fest.

Since then we’ve been continuing to unpack and get settled. We’ve given Sanitas a good bath after the boatyard. (Do you think they call it the poop deck because so many birds poop on it?) And we finally put the jib and staysail back up. We took them down so Keith at Advanced Sails could inspect them and do some minor repairs, and to have as little canvass as possible up during hurricane season. While we were at it, we replaced the sheets on those sails with nice shiny, clean, and snag-free ones.

We’ve also done lots of minor projects that don’t sound like much, but will hopefully improve our comfort and happiness in the months to follow. Such as installing lights in the cupboards and head, installing a small shelf in the bilge to keep our stores on canned food above the water, fixing that darn forward water tank hose and installing protection around the fitting, repairing latches on doors, fixing the squeaky companionway stairs, repairing the brass wall clock….You get the idea. In the process, we’ve made many trips to the dumpster, recycling, and Goodwill; made a bit trickier by the fact that our new parking space is about an eight-minute walk away. I hesitate to post pictures yet, because we aren’t yet organized and ready for prime time. Oh, ok. Since you insist. Here’s what living aboard looks like one week later:

But we are floating (not sinking!) and the view from the cockpit can’t be beat! One step closer to a tropical paradise.