I hereby name you…

October 23, 2023October 23, 2023 / FloatsOurBoat / 8 Comments

It can take a lot of money and effort to rename a boat. You need to re-register her with the Coast Guard under the new name, reprogram the AIS and VFH, buy and install new name decals. It’s enough to make me swear I’ll never rename a boat again! But, having a floating home with a name that feels right to us and feels like part of the family? Priceless!

Legend has it that when you do decide to rename a seafaring vessel, you need to hold a formal ceremony to protect the vessel and her crew from bad luck. You must make offerings to Poseidon and beg for his favor and protection. We held this ceremony and celebrated with several dozen of our friends and fellow sailors at Brunswick Landing Marina! We even had friends Shawn and Chantal from SV Camino drive down from Savannah to join us for the celebration!

In preparation, we stocked up on red wine, bubbly, beer, and snacks. We cleaned from bow to stern both above decks and below so we’d be free to offer tours. And we dug out our stash of courtesy flags and strung them up on a halyard to make her look colorful and festive. We removed all traces of the original name from our boat (on documents, decorative items, safety equipment and books) and prepared a metal ingot with the original name. With our friends gathered on the dock, beverages for toasting in hand, Capt. Mike and I walked forward to the bow and began the purging ceremony of the original name….

“Oh Poseidon, mighty and great ruler of the seas and oceans, to whom all ships and we who venture upon your vast domain are required to pay homage, I implore you in your graciousness to expunge for all time from your records and recollection the name “Hallelujah” which has ceased to be an entity in your kingdom. As proof thereof, we submit this ingot bearing her name, to be corrupted through your powers and forever be purged from the sea.”

I flung the metal tag over the bow into the water, then recited,

“In grateful acknowledgement of your munificence and dispensation, we offer these libations to your majesty and your court.”

I poured at least half a glass of champagne into the water, from east to west, then took a sip myself. This concluded the Purging Ceremony.

Now for the naming ceremony itself….

“Oh Poseidon, mighty and great ruler of the seas and oceans, to whom all ships and we who venture upon your vast domain are required to pay homage, I implore you in your graciousness to take unto your records and recollection this worthy vessel hereafter and for all time known as “Happy” guarding her with your mighty arm and trident and ensuring her of safe and rapid passage throughout her journeys within your realm. In appreciation of your munificence, dispensation, and in honor of your greatness, we offer these libations to your majesty and your court.”

I poured another glass of champagne into the water, this time from west to east.

Next, I attempted to appease the four wind gods, Boreas, Zephyrus, Eurus, Notus.

“Oh mighty rulers of the winds, through whose power our frail vessels traverse the wild and faceless deep, we implore you to grant this worthy vessel “Happy” the benefits and pleasures of your bounty, ensuring us of your gentle ministration according to our needs.”

Facing north, I tossed some champagne from my flute to the north as I said:

“Great Boreas, exalted ruler of the North Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your frigid breath.”

Facing West, I repeated the champagne pour and toss while saying:

“Great Zephyrus, exalted ruler of the West Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your wild breath.”

Facing East, I repeated the champagne pour and toss while saying:

“Great Eurus, exalted ruler of the East Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your mighty breath.”

Facing South, I poured the champagne and tossed it one last time while reciting:

“Great Notus, exalted ruler of the South Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your scalding breath”

Our marina friends gave three cheers to the newly christened “Happy” as Mike and I donned t-shirts with the name Happy on them, and tore off the brown paper to reveal Happy’s new name on the transom and the boom.

Everything after that was a bit of a celebratory blur 😀 We gave tours of our beautiful floating home, accepted good wishes from friends and neighbors, and eventually brought bottles of bubbly and snacks up to the yacht club to continue the celebrations into happy hour. It felt great not only to celebrate the new name, but also the accomplishment of all the hard work and many boat projects we’ve completed since we moved aboard in March. Happy is almost ready to untie the lines and start sailing! If you see us in an anchorage, come say hi – we just might have a bottle of bubbly left over to share 😉

Fun Times at Brunswick Landing Marina

October 15, 2023October 15, 2023 / FloatsOurBoat / 4 Comments

Have I mentioned how much we love staying at Brunswick Landing Marina in Georgia? Free laundry, frequent happy hours, friendly staff – what’s not to like? This Saturday we took a day off from neverending boat projects and really had a blast participating in the first annual Cruisers’ Challenge – an Amazing Race style scavenger hunt on land and water around the marina.

Capt. Mike and I joined our dock neighbors Ann and Frank as team Happy Dreamers 😁 We donned our matching team bandanas and hopped into our dinghy at 10am to tackle our first challenge. We’ve been in one place for so long, it felt strange to be getting splashed in the dinghy once again! We drove to the gps coordinates of our first clue and got really excited when we saw a huge airboat tied up to the dock at our destination. Yep! It was waiting for us! We hopped in, and zoomed off into the bay, traveling much faster (and much louder) than we had in our dinghy! The airboat captain dropped us off at a nearby island where we were given our challenge – each team member had to chip a golf ball into a target. We crushed it! Two minutes and 30 seconds and we were done and back in the boat.

Other teams were lining up on the dock waiting their turn for the airboat as we scanned a QR code for our next clue. Back in the dinghy and back to the marina! Challenge #2 required us to throw a life ring around a floating buoy, again all 4 of us had to successfully ring it, and we were timed as we tried. This is not easy!

And so our scavenger hunt continued. Each time we completed a challenge successfully, we’d get a colorful wristband to prove we’d finished that station. Then we’d scan a QR code to get the coordinates of our next stop, and off we’d go! Or challenges included:

Using a dock line like a lasso to tie a cleat hitch from a distance
Building wine cork sailboats and racing them across a “pond”
Making state fair style lemonade
Learning to cast a fly fishing rod
Singing a round of Row Your Boat
Solving puzzles and riddles
And even throwing an axe at zombies!

We didn’t win the race, but we sure had a great time! And the fun just kept on going! The marina held a customer appreciation oyster roast yesterday evening with three massive coolers full of oysters, a potluck of side dishes, and free wine and beer. I don’t think I’ve ever shucked an oyster before, so it was fun to learn! Mike says he doesn’t like oysters, but he sure ate a lot of them 🤣 Were very grateful to Brunswick Landing Marina for hosting such a fantastic event.

Our First Hurricane

September 2, 2023September 2, 2023 / FloatsOurBoat / 2 Comments

Capt. Mike and I returned to Brunswick, Georgia after a delightful summer vacation in Colorado. Less than two weeks back into boat life and boat projects, the National Hurricane Center forecast projected that Hurricane Idalia could pass right over us. Yikes! Time to test the claim that Brunswick Landing Marina is a safe hurricane hole!

Hurricane season in the Atlantic officially runs from 1 June to 30 November every year and historically the risk of dangerously strong storms is the highest in September and October. But because “you never know” we prepped our floating home for hurricanes when we left her back at the end of May. We removed her jib and staysail, replaced the running rigging with thinner messenger lines, covered the portlights with plastic, and secured the dinghy very tightly in the davits on the stern. We’re glad we did all that, because the marina experienced some very strong storms while we were gone – even to the point of bending the stainless tubing that supports our solar panels. And doing all that work in May meant we had a head start on prepping for Idalia.

Two days before the hurricane, we rented a car and drove to St Augustine to bring all three of our sails to a sail loft for inspection and repairs. On the way home, we stopped at Costco in Jacksonville to start provisioning non-perishables for the upcoming cruising season. Just our luck to do that on a day when all of Florida was buying bottled water, toilet paper, and canned goods. I was tempted to joke with the check-out clerk, “This is my first hurricane. Do you think I’ve got enough food?” 🤣

The day before the storm, everyone in the marina worked all day to prepare, helping each other out as needed. We doubled all our dock lines and applied new chafe gear, lashed down the bimini and solar panels, filled the water tanks, tested the radio and wind instruments, and packed go bags. We adjusted the lines on the abandoned boat in the slip next to ours and removed or secured anything in the marina that could fly around and cause damage in high winds. We checked on a few boats belonging to friends who were still out of town. And of course we checked every new storm forecast – studying the smallest details: What’s the latest storm track? Will Brunswick be under a Tropical Storm Warning, or a Hurricane Watch? How much storm surge should we expect? What’s the earliest time we can expect tropical storm force winds? What’s the probability we could see hurricane force winds? Finally, we collapsed into bed, fairly confident we’d done as much as we could possibly do to prepare.

I woke up the next morning around 5:30 to the sound of rain. Went back to sleep and woke again around 7:00 to the first howling winds. We nervously waited for the NHC to release their 8am products so we could evaluate what we were in for and what had changed overnight, and whether we should stay in the marina or catch an Uber to a hotel. Luckily, Idalia had tracked west overnight, now forecast to hit land in a lightly populated region of Florida’s Big Bend, and meaning we wouldn’t get hit with the full strength of the storm. So we decided to stay, knowing we might be uncomfortable, but we wouldn’t be unsafe.

I stuck it out on the boat until 11:30 am when we really started bouncing in the slip and when our wind instruments showed sustained winds of 25-35 and gusts of 52 knots 😲 I brought valuables, electronics, rain gear, and snacks up to the marina Yacht Club to wait it out. I’m not sure which was scarier – listening to the wind howl on the boat, or listening to TV News anchors trying to terrify us. The local news was filming from Dock 4 of our marina!

Capt. Mike joined me on land about 15 minutes before the power went out. No more scary tv broadcasts, but no more AC or phone chargers either. One transient visitor to the marina made me laugh because every time he walked into the yacht club he was wearing a bright red life vest and carrying a boat hook with a radio clipped to his belt – prepared for battle! We could keep an eye on Happy from the patio of the yacht club and kept track of how the rest of the marina was handling the winds by listening to the VHF radio. A water fixture broke on Dock 9, sending a geyser skyward until the water was shut off. Dock 4 lost some bolts and started to slowly break apart until the marina could hold it together temporarily with ratchet straps. But the worst effects of the storm were on Dock 0, the closest to the ocean, which experienced the brunt of the wind and the most fetch and waves. Three big motor yachts tied crosswise to the wind were repeatedly pushed onto the concrete dock, experiencing quite a bit of hull damage before the dock was evacuated, but not a single boat sank. A catamaran on that same dock hadn’t prepped for the storm and their jib was shredded by the high winds. Another improperly prepped boat on the hard in the boatyard had the wind unfurl their jib, giving it something for the wind to grab onto, eventually knocking the boat off its stands and knocking over the next two boats in the row. 😢

Finally, around 5:00, the winds shifted to the west indicating Idalia had passed north and the storm was fading. The yacht club filled with lots of relieved sailors, comparing stories and photos and breaking out a beer or a dram of rum to celebrate our good fortune. We all agreed we were very lucky in the westerly track the storm took, as well as the fact that it passed us at low tide. We’d been concerned that a tropical storm during full moon king tides could lead to crazy high tides and flooding but we lucked out. We appreciated the dramatic stripe of sunset beneath the heavy lingering clouds because “red sky at night means sailor’s delight” on our way to a secret candle-lit post-hurricane party in town. Happy lived to sail another day!

Our summer home in Brunswick, Georgia

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023 / FloatsOurBoat / 1 Comment

Our jaunt on the ICW ended a few miles up the Brunswick River at the Brunswick Landing Marina. Our boat will stay here, in a slip in the marina, for all of hurricane season while Mike and I will also do some land travel.

Brunswick is a large, lovely marina with a strong sense of community. Our dock fees here include laundry, the use of shared bikes and gas grills, and access to the club house with its frequent cruiser happy hours. It’s just a short walk to historic downtown Brunswick with some good restaurants, lovely shaded parks, a farmers market, and even a rum distillery.

Dinner with Island Spirit and Painkiller

Ok, enough fun – we still need to prepare for hurricane season and the possibility of severe summer storms. We’ve got an open-close checklist that we’ve used for years, but with a new boat and new systems, we have to review it and modify it. Also, we’re staying in the water this summer instead of hauling out, so we need to prepare a bit differently for that too. Basically, our priorities are to fix as many leaks as possible before we leave the boat unattended, and to reduce the windage and add lots of dock lines so that when heavy storms do occur, there’s little to no damage. Fingers crossed!

Most of our portlights are leaking in heavy rain, so we are gradually removing one at a time, cleaning and scraping off all the old caulk and silicone, and rebedding each one cleanly. We’re getting better at it, but each one still takes about 6 hours from start to finish. It’s a lot of work, AND mess. And it leaves a hole in the boat for hours at a time – not good in spring rain storms! It will be worth it when we can be confident that the rain stays on the outside and we don’t have to worry about water damage to the wood or anything else on the interior.

We took down our jib and staysail, covered all hatches and portlights, flushed the engine and outboard, did oil changes, defrosted the fridge, wiped the entire interior with white vinegar to discourage mold, and fixed a link to the cockpit shower. There’s always plenty of tasks that require Mike to squeeze into a small space!

Little Boat in the Big City

August 26, 2020August 26, 2020 / FloatsOurBoat / Leave a comment

Sanitas spent the month of August in Port Louis Marina in St George’s – the capital of Grenada. You know what a stay in a marina means, right? Shore power! Air conditioning! Real showers! A swimming pool! Ooh la la! We blinked, and the month flew by.

For the first time ever, we docked Sanitas stern-to a stone wall on the “Village Dock”. That should be easy, except Sanitas is “canoe-sterned”, aka a “double-ender.” While our pointy rear end is great for managing following seas, it doesn’t make it easy for her crew to step off the transom onto a dock. I worried about the situation for several days, but we bought a 10 inch wide, 12 foot long plank from Hubbard’s lumber yard, added some chafe protection and a few good knots, and several times a day I screwed up my courage and dashed across the narrow plank. So far, I haven’t fallen in, knock on wood!

The marina staff does a great job of making life here easy. Jenny’s Farmers’ market sets up shop each Friday selling produce, local coffee, beef, and juices. Convenient Market shows up in a big van full of produce every Monday selling a wide variety of whatever’s in season. It’s definitely on island time though – the super nice driver shows up sometime between noon and three o’clock – unless it’s one of the many Monday Grenadian holidays, when he doesn’t come at all.

Every afternoon around 5:00, marina-folk meet at the small swimming pool with insulated cocktail mugs in hand to float and chat until security kicks us out at 6:30. This ends up being a great way to meet new people and to learn about all the social events and hot spots in the area. One of my favorite hot spots is Grenada Yacht club, just a short dinghy ride across the harbor. This yacht club is our kind of place – casual, open air, overlooking the harbor with a lovely breeze, and a great place to meet up with cruisers and locals on Wednesday jerk chicken night or Friday barbecue. You can’t beat the 20ecd price (about $7.50) for a quarter chicken, rice and salad, with the best jerk sauce on the island. After our second Wednesday visit in a row, Capt. Mike submitted his membership application because, come on! Haven’t you always wanted to be a member of a yacht club? Dues also go to a good cause – sailing lessons for local Grenadian kids. (How do you like the Captain’s salty sailor shirt?)

I know I’ve only talked about fun events so far, but we actually got a lot of work done in the marina. We reversed our anchor chain – so the part we never use in shallow anchorages is now the part we use first all the time! This maneuver should let us get a few more years out of the galvanized chain. And we hired a local guy, Patrick, to repair some gel coat damage. Lesson learned for next time – negotiate the job price in advance, instead of agreeing to pay by the hour. AND… approve the color of the gel coat before each layer goes on, so you can prevent the mint-toothpaste-green debacle BEFORE it’s applied all over your boat. We also had several doctor appointments (that’s another blog post in and of itself), and researched sea freight shipping companies (yet another blog post), defrosted the fridge, and bought a new solar panel.

We really enjoyed our time in the well-run, secure marina, and it’s going to be a bit of an adjustment to return to living off grid! But that’s what this sailing life is all about, right?