cruising life

We’re Cruisers Again!

/ FloatsOurBoat / 4 Comments

When folks asked about our plans for this cruising season, I glibly answered, “Oh, we’ll spend a couple of months in the yard, but we’ll be cruising by Thanksgiving.” Even as I said it, I didn’t really believe it. Sure enough, Christmas somehow snuck up on us before we finally finished our projects, completed provisioning, and finally felt ready to untie the lines and head south.

This year, we had a flurry of friends seeing us off! Our friend Pat, from Siesta Key, joined us for the trip from St Petersburg to Sarasota. He and his family have been real supporters of our adventure. I think he finally understands what sailboat cruising is really like: it took an hour from him to drive to St Petersburg early on December 22nd, and it took us seven hours to bring him home by boat!

The trip down the ICW was fairly uneventful, until we were circling to wait for the next draw bridge opening. I was at the helm, and Capt. Mike was below decks getting a snack. He called up, “You doing ok?” And I said “Sure!” And then the depth reading went from 9 feet to 8 feet to SHALLOW WATER ALARM!!! And our boat speed went to zero. Darn it! Tried a quick burst of reverse to no avail. Mike had already heard the alarms and leapt into the cockpit. Now he loosened the mainsheet and swung the boom way out over the port side and called out to Pat for help. “Come on Pat! We’ve gotta hang our fat butts off the side!” With that strategic distribution of weight, Sanitas tipped over just enough that I could rev the engine, jam it into forward, and turn us sharply to starboard into deeper water. Hooray! We were moving again, and still had barely enough time to make it to the bridge for the next opening. (Ironically, we had just passed another sailboat aground just a quarter mile back. The drifting sand and shoaling in this part of the ICW is pretty tricky! Apparently you really need to be in the center of the channel!)

It was also a bit tricky timing our passage under the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. Three cargo ships were passing through at about the same time, and they are gigantic! If it came down to a game of chicken with a cargo ship, Sanitas will lose every time. Discretion is the better part of valor, so we slowed down by tacking upwind and let them go right on ahead.

Lots of traffic at the Cortez bridge on a sunny (but cold!) Saturday morning!

After picking up a ball at Marina Jack’s, we celebrated our first day back on the water with cocktails at Louies Modern.

Thanks for keeping us company, Pat! Come back and sail with us again any time!

A little drama in the marina

/ FloatsOurBoat / Leave a comment

I know. For the past month, all of my posts have been drudgery. Boat projects, hard work, blood-sweat-and-epoxy. But we had a little bit of excitement yesterday. No great photos, but that’s how you can tell things were exciting – if you don’t have time to take pictures, it must be a good story.

I was on the top deck of Sanitas, working on my latest teak refinishing project. And I heard a bit of yelling across the way at the St Petersburg Yacht Club fuel dock. I checked it out, but decided to mind my own business. Couples yell at each other while docking at the fuel dock all the time. None of my business, right? So I put my headphones back on, and cranked up the volume on This American Life, and got back to work. (Totally worth it! Look at that newly refinished hand rail!)

Oblivious to my surroundings, I heard much louder shouting. RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! I leapt to my feet, ripped the headphones off and dropped them on the deck, because a sailboat was about four feet from Sanitas’s bow and blowing right into me sideways. I jumped up the the bow pulpit and assumed the position to fend off this massive amount of inertia. And screamed “Mike! Get up here!”

Folks who normally live in a slip about four boats down were apparently moving to a new slip across the marina. Some of the boats that live here are in, harrumph, less than perfect working order. This one didn’t have a functional motor and was trying to move out of one slip, across the harbor, and into the new slip. Completely under sail. For those of you who aren’t sailors, this is not an easy maneuver! Especially since this couple might not have left their slip since they bought the boat.

When Capt Mike made it above decks, the couple asked for a tow over to their new slip. My first thought was “Bug? The smallest dinghy in the marina, with the smallest 5-horse power motor? Tow this big fat boat?” But Capt Mike went into superhero mode. He leapt into the dinghy, released the painter, and went to the rescue. Now it wasn’t a perfect rescue attempt. For the first ten minutes, Capt Mike and Bug made a valiant effort to tow the sailboat from the front. It was not a success. There was quite a lot of random drifting and close calls with all of the very expensive boats docked at the Yacht Club. Then Allen, a salty old guy why also lives on the dock, wandered over to watch the show and started giving me advice. “He shouldn’t be pulling the sailboat. He should be pushing from the stern.” So I repeated it all, just a little bit louder. “Hey Mike! Stop pulling. Push from the stern!” Allen knows his stuff.

So he tried it, and Bug saved the day! Lashed to the stern of the sailboat, her little outboard motor provided plenty of forward momentum. The woman who owned the boat could steer from the helm. And they putted their way across the marina to their new home. Did they shower Capt. Mike with thanks and gratitude, and maybe a spray of champagne? No. They did not. But he had the satisfaction of being a Good Samaritan. And Bug has a new friend who comes visit her at sunrise- a gorgeous grey sand crane.

I live on a Sailboat…. Again

/ FloatsOurBoat / 6 Comments

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.

Sanitas is back in the water!

/ FloatsOurBoat / 3 Comments

After spending hurricane season safely tucked away in Salt Creek Marina in St Petersburg, Florida…. SV Sanitas is back in the water where she belongs!

We left Sanitas stored in St Pete while Capt. Mike and I visited friends and family in New York and Colorado in July and August. Then we returned to hot and humid Florida and spent two months working six days a week in the dirty boat yard to repair and maintain our boat, and to get her ready for another cruising season. She was in pretty good condition when we returned, however we found a few leaks admitting water and slimy mold, and we had a list three pages long of things we identified last year of “Must Dos” before we ventured forth on our 2nd season of cruising.

I admit, I’m a little nervous. I may have gotten soft over the summer – too used to long hot showers, comfy beds, and cooking in a kitchen. In the next 24 hours, we’ll be moving aboard again, somehow trying to fit everything that’s currently in our storage unit, and everything that’s in our rental apartment into a 37-foot monohull sailboat. (Spoiler alert: its not going to fit. We have several trips to Goodwill in our future).

We need to start paying attention to weather and battery charges again, and go back to small, simple living. But … we also get out of the boatyard, and are able to start looking forward to winter in The Bahamas. We’re off the Salt Creek for the last time; to install a new battery bank, inspect our mainsail, and to move to the St Pete Municipal Marina. Wish us luck!

Back in the Real World

/ FloatsOurBoat / Leave a comment

Our first days back in Florida were a bit of a let down. Here we were back “home” in the US after almost four months, but we were still far from friends and family. The endless rain brought by Alberto that left us trapped on the boat didn’t help either. And we suddenly had a mold problem. All the rain and humidity of the past few weeks triggered a full blown mold bloom on every wooden surface inside Sanitas. Since it smelled a bit funny and drove our allergies crazy, the first couple of days in Boot Key Harbor were spent moving every thing we owned from one part of the boat to another, and dousing all wooden surfaces with vinegar and hydrogen peroxide. Fun!

We also watched on social media as all of our friends back In Colorado celebrated Memorial Day at the Bolder Boulder 10k without us, and as my fellow Skirt Sports ambassadors had a wonderful and inspiring time at the annual retreat. So we consoled ourselves… with food! We’d devolved into eating cold soup right out of the can on our Gulf Stream crossing. Plus, after the cost of groceries and eating out in The Bahamas, Florida seemed dirt cheap. And varied! So we made good use of the free cruiser bikes at the marina to make long, luxurious shopping trips to Publix, hit the early bird steakhouse special, the Mexican restaurant, and several visits to the Overseas Pub.

Suddenly… everything changed. The storm passed and the sun came out, and all of the friends we met during the last cruising season started passing through Boot Key Harbor on their way back to wherever they planned to spend hurricane season! Suddenly, our social calendar was full. And we had more excuses to eat out. We spent one fun evening with Todd and Celia of SV Eileen, sharing pizza, seared tuna, and a bottle of wine in the cockpit at sunset. We met Pat and Melana of Tapati for happy hour at Keys Fisheries – the same place we sat and discussed our plans for the cruising season back in February. We met Robert and Rhonda of Eagle Too for the first time since the Georgetown Regatta. And we helped Colin and Dawn Marie of Wavelength prepare for their summer season in Cuba and Guatemala; trading currency, guidebooks, music, movies, and gluten free food back and forth between our boats. Pretty amazing when you think about it that we knew no one when we bought a boat and moved to Florida in the fall of 2017, and here we were less than a year later finding so many friends in port! I guess that’s the proof of a successful cruising season, right?