That's a wrap

We are at the Lake Park municipal marina, along the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) in Lake Park, Florida (map).  We are on the floating docks on the south side of the basin; the Trawler Fest show completely consumed the fixed docks on the north side, and the marina was completely overwhelmed when we arrived.  We ended up station-keeping in the basin for several minutes while they figured out who we were and directed us to our spot.

While we are only a couple hundred feet from the show boats by water, it's a long walk around the basin by land.  Still, it was nice to just be able to walk to the show; apparently, most of the staff, vendors, and attendees are in hotels across the ICW, a 15 minute or so drive.  We were able to walk home for lunch, and stumble home with no worries after the nightly cocktail parties.

We had a great time.  We did not find anything here that we needed to purchase, and there were only a handful of boats that were new to us from which we could get some ideas, but we reconnected with a dozen or so old friends, and made some new ones, too.  The connections we make at these shows have been great sources of information for our cruising life.

We docked starboard-side-to and so were unable to offload the scooters, so we really have not gone further afield than a few blocks from the marina.  There is a grocery store a very short walk from the dock, which has come in handy with four of us aboard, and a nice white-tablecloth restaurant, the Pelican Cafe, a few blocks north, where we had dinner before the show started.

The show wrapped up last night, and many of the exhibitor boats have already left.  We've decided to move along as well, and with no other particular destination in mind, we've decided to head back to Stuart with Martin and Steph.  They need to be back this evening, so we'll shove off this morning near slack water and head north.  Conditions outside are not great, and we'd hit the St. Lucie Inlet at an unfavorable tide, so we'll instead take the inside route up the ICW.

By the rockets' red glare

We are docked at the Harborview Marina in Baltimore, Maryland.  We had an excellent cruise here from Rock Point on Thursday, in perfect weather.  While we do enjoy remote anchorages, there is also something special about coming in to a busy harbor -- so many sights to see.  We had a fair amount of wind when we arrived, though, and it took me two passes to back into the slip.  I might actually turn the boat around today and put her nose-in, because we are facing due east at the moment and the afternoon sun is brutal on the aft deck.  Or maybe not -- we'll probably be more sociable if we can see folks walking the docks when we sit there.

Even though this is a fantastic spot, with lots of attractions a short walk away and even more accessible by scooter, water taxi, or the Charm City Circulator, we've been mostly confined to the boat since we arrived, trying to get everything squared away and ship-shape for our visitors and the show.  For example, when we arrived, the faces for the drawers under the master berth were still sitting atop the guest berth. we still had water in the bilges from our cruise last week, and parts for a fuel-filter upgrade project were all over the engine room.

I figured I had enough time to get all this done, especially having moved our arrival up one day, but of course I did not count on the "extra" projects that would land on my plate.  It is said that cruising simply means working on your boat in exotic locations, and it was inevitable some things would break while we are here.

Once we were docked, signed in, hooked up, and settled, one of our first orders of business was to unload the scooters, so we can have wheels while we are in town.  I had ordered some brand new hoisting tackle for the scooters, which was waiting for us when we arrived, to replace the jury-rigged setup I had cobbled together at Home Depot.  The new tackle, from McMaster-Carr, involves a rated nylon lifting sling, a pair of rated aluminum carabiners, and a stainless steel O-ring, the weakest link in the setup at 750 pounds WLL (the davit itself is rated for 800, and the scooters weigh less than 300 apiece).

The new tackle worked like a charm, and we were easily able to get the scooters right to the lift point from their chocks without any excessive jockeying.  Lifting them without first moving the tender back was tricky but do-able, however in the future I think we will slide the tender back a foot first.  Their positions on deck determine the lifting order, and my (slightly larger) scooter went down to the dock first.

I had Louise's scoot in the slings and was adjusting the O-ring position for a level lift when the davit decided it would no longer go up -- only down.  I could hear the solenoid clicking, but the motor was not budging.  Louise was already on the dock, ready to take the tag lines, and I had the scooter balanced precariously after having unloaded the tension on the lifting line, with no way to take up slack.  Eventually we got the bike unhooked and put it on its side stand over a piece of plastic decking so I could work on the davit.

I should not have been surprised, given that the controller connector had previously crapped out already, and I had noticed that the manufacturer had chosen to use solenoids rated for indoor use in this fairly exposed application.  It took me the better part of three hours to remove the solenoid pack, dismantle it, test each solenoid (both were working), and clean the corrosion off every terminal and bridge bar with a combination of bastard file, emery cloth, and wire brush.  I found the ground terminal to also have been hooked to the wrong place, although the davit seemed to be working that way up to now.

Once I had them all cleaned up and the solenoid contacts exercised a bit, it all worked fine when I got it back together.  Only later did I discover that we actually have a spare solenoid and bridge bars aboard, which is good to know for the next time, but I am glad we did not need them.  Better late than never, we resumed the hoist, albeit in more wind than when we had started.

Wind notwithstanding, we got Louise's scooter safely down to the dock.  As she was unhooking the hoisting tackle, though, the steel O-ring jumped out of her hand.  Being completely round, it rolled right off the dock and into the 25'-deep harbor, never to be seen again.  It cost me less than five bucks, so no big deal, and I will replace it with a pear-shaped lifting ring to avoid this problem in the future.  This latter item does not come in stainless, but the galvanized ones have higher ratings anyway, and will slip less on the sling.

We pushed the scoots to the parking lot, which is a long way down the pier and around the corner, where they are securely chained up.  Our marina pass includes parking and we have a gate key for the lot.  As yet, we have not had a chance to go anywhere with them, but Louise will probably go out for groceries later today.

Not that we haven't left the boat.  We did manage to get out, at least a little ways, for dinner each night since we arrived.  So far we've had burgers at the Tiki Barge at the end of the dock (a great drinking venue but we'll probably not dine there again), Cuban food at Little Havana just down the street (the joint behind which we were parked in Odyssey when we were here two yeas ago), light fare at Cafe Sorso in the marina building, and last night we walked to Porter's a few blocks away, a place we also remembered from our last visit.

Once we had the forward stateroom cleaned out, we decided to use the forward shower for the first time since Captain Chris was aboard back in February.  We'd made some changes to the drain system in there while we were in the yard, and a few days ago I repaired some damaged trim and re-caulked, and we wanted to give it a test before our guests arrived.  Good thing we did.  No hot water.

We fell back to the master shower and I set about to trace (again) all the water lines to the shower to make certain the vinyl hose that carries the water the last dozen feet had not gotten pinched somewhere during the copious yard work in the area.  This involved pulling up carpets, opening bilges, and unscrewing access panels in the forward stateroom.  I found no obvious problems.  I did remember reading that the previous owner had exactly the same problem early on, which turned out to be the shower valve itself, and a bit of research revealed these valves to be notorious for blockage due to calcium (hard water) deposits.

With no way (yet) to isolate this shower from the rest of the water system -- one of my many long-term project goals -- we opted to defer the repair to the next morning when we could run out for a new valve if needed.  Again another unplanned three-hour project, but I was able to remove, disassemble, clean, reassemble, and reinstall the existing valve with good results.  I was fortunate to already have the correct size O-rings on hand for the rebuild in my little O-ring kit.  I think the culprit in our case was rust, not calcium, which had worked its way into the valve from the steel piping upstream.  I am constantly removing rust particles from the faucet aerators, and I look forward to the day when I pitch the last galvanized water pipe overboard.

I think we are finally ready for guests, and our good friends Martin and Steph arrive this evening.  They will be staying with us through Sunday morning when they return to California.  In a surprise last-minute development, our other good friends Ben and Karen will be joining us on Sunday for the final day of Trawler Fest and we will host them for cocktails aboard and perhaps even have dinner with them.  Other commitments preclude it being more than a day trip for them on this visit, but at least they will get to see the boat.

Last night we were treated to a fantastic fireworks display a mere 500' away, at the Museum of Industry.  I'm not sure what the occasion was, as I could not find it listed anyplace, and the Notice to Mariners only reports time and location for such events and not purpose.  With such a long display so close, the cats were shell-shocked for a good half hour or so, and Louise, who was testing the forward shower at the time, missed most of it.  The lone fire truck and crew sent to babysit the operation looked bored; I suppose 200 years of fireworks over Baltimore harbor has the locals blasé about it.

Unfortunately, last night I also spent two hours wrestling with the inverter.  I've written here that we have been having lots of trouble with the batteries and the inverter has not been keeping them charged.  The batteries are shot, and the battery condition itself was the primary factor implicated in the problem, or so we thought.  But now that we are at the dock and have AC power available full time, this should all be moot.



So when the house DC voltage started dropping even while plugged in full time, I finally knew for certain that we had a charger problem independent of the marginal batteries.  Over the past two weeks I have tried every possible combination of master resets, full reprograms, multiple settings, and even removing batteries from the system, to no avail.  Some Internet research turned up a few folks who had similar problems that turned out to be loose connections on one of the control boards, and so after dinner I opened up the case and systematically removed and reinstalled every jumper and connecting wire on the suspect board.  I did find one wire to be quite loose, and so far the charger now seems to be working normally after getting it all back together (minus the cover, until we're certain).  Only time will tell, but I hope to have the unit buttoned back up before we do any engine room tours.



This morning we were treated to the arrival of the liberty ship John W. Brown under power of a trio of tugboats.  The Brown will be our classroom for the next five days, and our dining venue for part of that time.  It is tied up at the pier where were were parked two years ago; ironically, we'd have a much shorter walk had we arrived in the bus.

I expect this will be my last post here until after Trawler Fest, or about another week or so.  Trawler Fest segues into the MTOA rendezvous, but I will try to squeeze in an update somewhere in the middle if I can.

Moving day

We are back at the marina in Savannah, Georgia after our whirlwind trip to Fort Lauderdale.  Today is the big day, the day we officially "move" from Odyssey to Vector. Fittingly, today is also the day the sign company will arrive to remove the old name from the boat and apply the new one; we have a bottle of champagne all set to be sacrificed to Neptune in the official de-naming ceremony, which must be done in the short window while the transom is blank, and tomorrow we will use yet another bottle to christen the boat with her new name.

I actually had planned to post here yesterday morning, with our final Odyssey road-trip report before the big move.  However my laptop froze immediately after I booted it, first cup of coffee in hand.  Thereafter it would not boot at all, and it took me the rest of the day to repair it.  There were some bad spots on the hard drive, and a couple of them ended up in critical Windows files, including the paging file.  I've had two or three similar crashes in the last couple of months, which I had attributed to bad antivirus software, the removal of which had seemed to cure the problem.  I can probably put my preferred antivirus back now, but I will need to get myself a new hard drive -- generally once this kind of decay starts, you can count on it to continue until the drive is completely unusable.

In any case, what I would have said yesterday morning is that we were at a small truck stop in Darien, Georgia (map).  It had the advantage of being right across the street from a Ruby Tuesday, where we ate after a long driving day.  The restaurant turned out to share a parking lot with an outlet mall.  Although half the storefronts in the mall were vacant (not sure if the mall was dying, or brand new), after dinner we stopped in to browse and ended up buying a number of kitchen items for the boat at the kitchenware outlet, as well as two pair of boat shoes at the shoe outlet.  The truck stop adjoined a commercial tire shop and was a fine stop for the night, right where we needed it to be.  We arrived just before sunset.

Monday morning found us at the Walmart in Fort Pierce, Florida (map), a familiar stop. On our last visit there, I wrote that security asked us to park with the other RVs, which were all at the north end of the lot.  This time when we arrived, all the rigs were at the south end, and we simply parked among them rather than tempt fate with security.  Once again there were plenty of rigs, perhaps a dozen or so, and a sort of campground atmosphere had broken out in the lot, with people strolling around among rigs and chatting.  At least we did not see lawn chairs and other camping accoutrements on this visit, as I have noted there before.

After dinner at Cowboys' restaurant next door, where most patrons had crammed into the bar to watch the big game, we went into the store to continue filling our boat outfitting list, since getting bulkier items once we're parked at the marina is tricky.  I ended up buying another half dozen or so large plastic bins for storage in the outside lockers in the Portugese bridge and flybridge coaming, and we added to the growing collection of floor mats, linens, and other items needed in various spots around the boat.  I am certain there are "yachtsmen" who will be horrified to learn that we are outfitting the boat at Walmart.

We got a fairly early start Monday, but our first stop was just a quarter mile away, at the Home Depot.  There we bought two comfortable patio chairs for the aft deck, along with a pair of hardwood folding chairs and matching folding table which we can use on the aft deck and the flybridge.  We had scoped all these items out at our Home Depot visit in Jacksonville on the way south.  The one outdoor chair that came with the boat was just done, and we gave it away.  There had been a pair of them when we first saw her in July, but the other one apparently disintegrated before we arrived for the sea trial.  Between all the storage bins, patio furniture, and other items, the living room of the bus was chock-a-block with boat items by the time we rolled in to the marina.

We only made it as far as Fort Pierce Sunday because we got a late start from Dania Beach.  After my last post here we met up with local friends Steve and Harriett.  They have a Neoplan Spaceliner similar to Odyssey (theirs is longer, wider, and newer), which was recently featured on the Travel Channel in the Mega RV Countdown.  They also have a large boat, and over brunch at nearby Lester's Diner, we got to talking about tenders, and Steve mentioned he had a Novurania RIB he wasn't using and would be happy to sell us. So we ended up heading over to his storage unit after brunch to look at it, and, while we were there, we also looked at the golf cart he just finished modifying to fit in one of his luggage bays, replacing the single-seat ATV he's kept in there thus far.

It ended up being a longer day down south than we had planned, but it was productive, because we decided to buy the tender to replace the one we have now, which needs some work and is not the style we prefer.  It comes with a trailer, so we will end up swapping our existing tender onto the trailer so we can sell them together, which will make things easier for whoever buys it.  Unlike our current one, the "new" dinghy (they are the same age) sports running lights, a steering wheel and throttle lever instead of tiller steering with twist grip, real seats, a VHF radio, a GPS chartplotter, and integral fuel tank.  As we plan mostly to anchor out, all these features will be welcome.

We were pretty happy with the decision, but things got even better when Steve texted us on our way here to say he is interested in the Frigibar chest freezer we have on our aft deck.  It's a fantastic unit; my jaw dropped when I looked them up to see how much they cost new.  The previous owner had it installed on the boat when he fist bought it.  But, as nice as it is, and as handy as it would be when we finally start cruising offshore, it takes up valuable space on the aft deck that we would rather have for dining, cocktails, or just relaxing.  The area barely holds two chairs now, and with the freezer gone we can fit four chairs around the table I mentioned above.  So I had listed it on the Trawler mailing list as well as the local Craigslist.

If Steve ends up taking the freezer we can make the swap with the tender in one trip, and we'll only have a single cash transaction, easier all around.  If I can get a few bucks for the open-style Nautica tender and 25hp Honda that we have now, our out-of-pocket costs for the new tender will be quite reasonable.  That will leave more in the kitty to fix some of the other problems on the boat.

As we rolled into the Savannah area yesterday we stopped at Petsmart for a new automatic litter box and Home Goods for more linens to round out the great outfitting expedition.  The litter box was non-negotiable, as I need to have the cats' necessities handled before we move them aboard later today.  The cats sometimes seem to run our lives, and this will be no exception:  once they are aboard, we will officially be "moved in" and tonight will be our first night on the boat.  We want to get them settled and at least partly acclimated to the boat before our training captain arrives Friday and we shove off Saturday morning for a four day training cruise.

Once we are on the boat our access to the Internet will be much more constrained than it has been on the bus.  I expect my posting frequency to drop considerably.  I also do not plan to post our location in real time any longer, the consensus among cruisers being that it represents something of a security risk.  But stay tuned, because there is lots more to come.  Among other things, I plan to do an Odyssey wrap-up at some point, wherein I will share some of the statistics from eight and a half years on the road.

Great show, but we're exhausted

We are in the oversize vehicle parking at the Outdoor World store in Dania Beach, Florida (map), a familiar stop for us.  We had hoped to be heading north yesterday after leaving Trawler Fest just before the show ended, but the Saturday night scene along the beach, and along Las Olas through downtown made the five mile drive from the hotel to the freeway a 40-minute affair.  As it was then past dark, we abandoned our original plan to make it to the Elks lodge in Delray Beach, just 20 minutes north, especially since we'd ,be fighting our way through the Saturday night crowds in that trendy town, too.

Even though the Outdoor World was really the wrong direction, it's the only convenient alternative in the Fort Lauderdale area on short notice, ever since the Isle Pompano Casino stopped allowing RV parking.  We had a nice dinner in their attached Islamorada Fish Company restaurant, and spent a half hour browsing the marine accessories section of the store.  There is also a Diver's Direct store in this same complex, which is a fun place to browse if you scuba dive.

Our arrival in Fort Lauderdale got off to something of an inauspicious start.  We lingered in Cocoa Beach just long enough to enjoy the morning and take a quick swim, opting to enjoy our time there and take the freeway south, rather than get an early start to take the slower route.  We were on schedule to arrive at the Bahia Mar a bit before 5pm, so we could meet our friends for cocktails, maybe say hello to a few other folks, and then go to dinner together down the street.  As we approached the area on I-95, our fuel supply was getting to the quarter-tank mark, which is close to where the generator pickup tube stops, and we opted to stop for fuel before we arrived at the hotel.  Gas Buddy found us a Hess station with a decent price, and we put in enough to run the generator during our stay.  It was an automotive station, and so I needed to back away from the pumps to get back out when we were done.

Halfway into my backing turn, we heard a loud bang and what sounded like a scrape.  I slammed on the brakes, thinking I had backed right into a car, or maybe a gas pump, but a check of all the mirrors and the rear camera showed there was nothing around us at all.  That's when I noticed the tire monitor was screaming -- we had blown the left tag tire, quite spectacularly.  I think we nearly gave the guy fueling next to us a heart attack.

With the tire in shreds and only a thin strip of rubber between our expensive aluminum rim and the concrete, it was all I could do to roll forward back to the pump so we were not blocking the driveway.  We would be stuck right there until we could get a tire and someone to mount it.

This was really my own fault. The tire was done hundreds of miles ago, but, given that we are just about to lay the bus up for years, I was trying to nurse it along until we move onto the boat, just a few days from now.  It might well have made it, too, if not for the backing turn.  That tends to push the swiveling tag axle in exactly the opposite direction, and, like a grocery cart with a stuck caster, drags the tires sideways along the ground.

That dragging is why we never put good rubber on the tag, and, in this case, it is what ripped the tire open by the already frayed belts.  Of course, I also did not want to put a shiny new tire on it now, but, after talking to our roadside assistance and calling a half dozen places, ther was nary a used tire to be found in our size.
The best we could do was $375 for a Roadmaster, and by the time I paid for after hours mounting and disposal it was half a bill.

Fortunately it was all done in less than two hours, and we pulled into Bahia Mar by 7pm, in plenty of time for dinner at Coconuts a block away. The bottom line is that I gambled and I lost; if I had dealt with this sooner, I probably could have picked up a pair of used tires for the tag axle and replaced both sides at once for the same amount of money.  As it stands now, I still need to change the other side.

One reason we had hoped to arrive at Bahia Mar before 5, in addition to the reasons already mentioned, plus driving in the daylight, is that the hotel now flies the Hilton Doubletree flag, and we were concerned that the parking contractor or policies might have changed since our last visit.   So we approached the gate with some trepidation, especially since finding a backup plan in the dark might be a problem.  Also, we'd miss dinner with friends.

We were relieved, then, when the parking attendant at the gate simply opened it and waved us through.  We proceeded directly to the empty corner of the lot where we usually stay (map), an easy walk to the entire show, but out of everyone's way.  We were relieved, when we pulled out yesterday, to learn that the rate had not changed, and we paid $150 for our three nights.  High for parking, but cheap to be at the Bahia Mar.  That said, the hotel is a bit long in the tooth, and not really up to Doubletree standards, so they have some work ahead of them.

Trawler Fest itself was great, and we enjoyed catching up with many dear friends.  It was interesting being there for the first time as actual boat owners, and we started the conversation with several yards that can help with the work we need done.  We got lots of ideas for deck furniture and other items by looking at boats, and we learned a few things in the seminar program.

This morning we'll have brunch with local friends Steve and Harriet before heading north.  We'd like to be back in Savannah tomorrow night.  Our training captain arrives Friday, and we need to be mostly moved aboard by then.

Closing the loops

Tonight we are at our old familiar spot in Cocoa Beach, Florida.  As usual, no map link in consideration of our very generous host here.  Regular readers may remember that we were in exactly this spot near the end of September when we made a last-minute decision to drive to California, by way of South Dakota, to attend a wedding and then stick around to help my cousins get settled there.  It's good to be back, and it feels like closure for that trip, so that's one loop closed.

This morning found us at a familiar Walmart in Jacksonville, Florida (map), which is somewhat of another loop closed, considering we had to stop there on our way to Savannah to wire the funds for the boat.  We did not quite make it all the way back to the bank, but we passed the exit for it this morning.  This particular Walmart is across the street from a Home Depot, and after dinner last night we walked over and picked up a number of hardware items for the boat that, for whatever reason, we could not find in Savannah at either Home Depot or Lowe's.  We also dropped a few coins in the Walmart on extra dishware, mats, and other items that, again, we had trouble finding in Savannah.

While it's great to be back here, it's hard to stop for just a single night.  We really like it here, just a block from the beach, and walking distance to several stores and nice restaurants.  Louise took me across the street to one of our favorites to celebrate my closing, yet again, of that biggest loop of all, the one around the sun.  It will be difficult to leave here in the morning.  We might make it back for another single night on our trip north, but either way, this is likely either our last or second-to-last night in this spot in the bus, and that makes me a little sad.

The combination of yesterday's shift from unseasonably cold temperatures in the east to unseasonably warm ones (the result of an odd weather pattern) with moving south some 4° in latitude, has caused us to go from running the furnace to running the air conditioning literally overnight.  In Savannah we were running the heat in the evening and again in the morning, and had the electric blanket on.  By the time we woke up in Jacksonville we had the windows open, and on the way here I change to short sleeves and we cranked up the A/C.  By the time we hit Fort Lauderdale I'll be in sandals.

Yesterday we wrapped up whatever we could on the boat, left the keys with the marina staff, and headed out by mid-afternoon.  We met John at the Ford Plantation, where they have a cottage, to return the car they so generously loaned us, and he gave us a little tour.  The grounds, now a gated residential community, were once the winter estate of Henry Ford.  The property is well-manicured and some of it is in much the same state as Ford left it.  We got to walk through Ford's house, now used for guest quarters and dining facilities for club members.  It was very nice of John to give us a tour of the area.  Of course, we also used the opportunity to ask questions about the boat, which we've been writing down as we go along (what does that red switch do?)  I'm hoping we'll be able to have another dinner with John and Laura Lee when we return to Savannah after our training cruise.

Tomorrow we will leave here mid-day and head to Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale.  Our friends Martin and Stephanie, freshly returned from a visit to the factory in China where their new Nordhavn is under construction, also arrive tomorrow afternoon and we plan to have dinner with them.  We're looking forward to catching up with the rest of the Passagemaker/Trawler Fest gang as well, and we've also got about three notebook pages full of things to research while we are at the show.  It should be a very rewarding event, but I expect I will not have much, if any, time to blog until after it is over.

Too much to do

We are parked at a marina in the Savannah area.  I'm not quite ready to post a map link yet.  On Wednesday, our very first full day of boat ownership, John met us at Thunderbolt and helped us get Vector moved here.  John handled the delicate maneuvering around the docks, and I drove for most of the rest of the trip.  We have a lot to learn.

Since tying up here, we've been spending all day every day on board, getting things cleaned up , sorted through, stowed, and generally ready for us to move in about a week from now.  We've enjoyed our first cocktails on the deck, and I even went down to the boat one night to see how all the outside lights looked.  But we've been eating and sleeping here on Odyssey, in consideration of the cats, who seem at times to run our lives.

John left a lot of things on board, some useful and others less so.  I went through everything in the engine room, stowing the useful items in plastic bins and organizing them into the vestibule, which will be my workshop.  At one point I came upstairs and announced that John had a filter problem, having found no fewer than two dozen spare filters stashed around the engine room.  Louise turned to me and said, no, he had a cleaning-product problem, as she had found at least 17 spray bottles of cleaning products around the boat, including four different bottle of 409.  We will rib him about it when we see him later, if he does not read it here first.  Seriously, on this boat, it's easy to lose track of things, as there are storage places everywhere, many of which are hard to see.

I am guessing also that he inherited at least some, if not all, of the filters.  Louise organized all the paperwork, most of which dates from the original construction of the boat, and the first owner had ordered $1,100 worth of spare filters.  Unless we get a full load of really bad fuel someplace, I am having a hard time imagining we can ever use all these filters. Of course, one load of bad fuel is all it takes...

Anyway, we've been at it for four days now, and we are still nowhere near ready to move in.  But at least we know where everything is now, and I've been familiarizing myself with the location and operation of all the important systems, so we are ready for our training cruise in ten days.  Last night I curled up with the windlass manual, if that gives you a sense of the excitement.

In a short while we will button things up here and head south in Odyssey.  We will make a stop in Richmond Hill to visit with John and return the car they so generously lent us, and drop off a couple of items that I think he inadvertently left aboard.  Tonight we should be somewhere in the Jacksonville area.  We plan to be at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale Wednesday, so we can have dinner with friends and be ready for the start of Trawler Fest on Thursday morning.

We own a boat!

We are in the parking lot of Thunderbolt Marina, in the small township of Thunderbolt, adjacent to Savannah, Georgia (map).  Out our windows we have a view of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, and, to the north, the 65'-tall bridge that carries US-80 over it.

Yesterday morning found us in Jacksonville, Florida, where we spent the night at a Walmart on the east side of town, ironically right next door to the Camping World (map). We had first tried a different Walmart closer to the bank, with several nice dining options in walking distance, but even though it was not listed that way in our directory, it was clearly posted No Overnight Parking.  Our drive to Jacksonville from the Spirit of the Suwannee was otherwise uneventful, although this was our very first time on the stretch of I-10 between I-75 and its eastern terminus at Jacksonville.

We rolled over to the bank just as they opened and found it pleasantly empty when we walked in.  We had absolutely no trouble arranging the wire transfer; the banker merely looked at Louise's South Dakota driver licence.  They did not even ask us to enter the PIN for our ATM card.  So all the sturm und drang about transaction security came down to a glance at an out-of-state license.

We were in Richmond Hill, just south of Savannah, by 12:30, and the sellers of the boat, John and Laura Lee, met us at the Love's truck stop there to lend us their spare car, a 90's-era Jeep with a stick shift and manual transfer case, so we could get around while we are in town.  Very nice of them to take such good care of us, and we asked them to join us last night for our celebratory dinner.

All the funds were in the seller's account by mid-afternoon, and the boat is now ours.  We arrived at the boatyard early in the afternoon, and they sent us to this lot to get the bus squared away.  We are a good ways from the boat here, so we've been driving back and forth in the Jeep, which requires going through two locked gates each time (the marina and boat yard, while under the same ownership, have separate entrances, and the boat is still in the yard).

When we got aboard yesterday, a technician was in the engine room wrapping up the last project on the previous owners' watch, an air conditioning pump that had gone bad last week,  John allowed that he hoped this was the angry god of the sea's last jab at him, and I know how he feels.  Regular readers will know that our toilet broke last week, and just yesterday I spent two hours repairing the satellite system, which gave up the ghost right after we left Suwannee.

We loaded a very small handful of things aboard, including a set of new dishware that we bought just for the boat, a shop vac we also bought for the occasion, and some paper goods.  We'll be living aboard Odyssey for at least a dozen more days, as we will be driving down to Fort Lauderdale next week for Trawler Fest.  As much as we'd like to spend a night in our new digs right away, we think moving onto the boat is going to be stressful enough for the cats without forcing them to make the transition twice.

We have lots of work to do to get the boat ready for our occupancy.  First among them is figuring out where the cats' litter box is going to live -- the last thing we want to do after they are aboard is to mess with their routine any more than is necessary.  We also need to containerize and stow all the loose items that had been stored elsewhere and are now on the boat, such as the touch-up paint kit.  And we want to give the whole boat a thorough cleaning before we start loading any more things aboard.

We have four more days here before we need to head for Fort Lauderdale, and we'll get as much done in that time as we can.  I emailed two different sign companies this morning to get quotes on re-lettering the transom, which really needs to get done before our training cruise which starts February 8th.  And we need to get the boat tied up in a regular slip here in town so we have a temporary base for all these activities.

We had a wonderful dinner last night with John and Laura Lee at Tubby's Tank House, just down the street from the marina.  We discussed getting the boat moved and John, who holds a captain's license (our insurance will not let us move the boat without a licensed captain until we are "signed off"), is going to meet us here at 1pm so we can shuttle a car over to the other marina, go over a few things aboard, and get underway in time to make port at the new slip before dark.  We want to arrive at something other than low water, and high tide this afternoon will be at 6pm.

Camping with the Corps

We are at the Army Corps of Engineers' Service Park Campground, on Coffeeville Lake (map), an impoundment of the Tombigbee River.  The river/lake is well past flood stage, as we knew from a weather alert I received on my phone while still en route, and we were warned about it when we checked in.  Another few feet and it will be in the campground.

The river is also zipping by at a good clip.  From the numerous snags and other debris racing by, including a full-size chest freezer this morning, I would estimate five knots or so.  A couple of tows went by upstream last night after locking through Coffeeville, and they were working hard, engines screaming.  Our new boat has been by this very spot once before, when the current owner brought it down from Wisconsin, and if we can deal with the extra height he has added to the boat in the form of a fixed canvas top, we'll come by here in it ourselves some day, preferably not in this much current.

This is a lovely park, apparently recently reopened after a major renovation of the camp sites.  We have 50 amps of power for our $20, and a lovely view of the river (non-riverfront sites are $2 less), along with all the usual CoE ammenities.  We're parked just one site away from the comfort station and Louise has been taking advantage of the laundry facilities.

Yesterday's drive was scenic and mostly relaxing. We stopped for fuel at a Murphy (Walmart) station in Laurel, MS, which had diesel for $3.529, the cheapest on the remainder of our route.  It took about an hour to put in 200 gallons, an amount that required four transactions as the station limits them to $200 each.  While we were fueling I kept checking my email, as we were waiting for revised closing documents on the boat -- the ones we had printed out first thing in the morning turned out to have Louise's name misspelled.

We left Laurel when we were done fueling, not realizing that Laurel was, in fact, the last town until Dothan, Alabama which had either a UPS or FedEx shipping location where we could overnight the documents back.  We couldn't make Dothan before last pickup, and we did not want to turn back to Laurel when we discovered this a half hour out of town. After much research on the smart phone, Louise finally located a lone UPS drop box in front of a bank in Waynesboro, MS, with a pickup time of 4pm.

We parked a block away from the drop box at about 3:30 and it was all we could do to download the revised documents, print them, sign them, and get a UPS label printed before the deadline.  We dropped the envelope in the slot right at 4pm; at 7:30 I got an update from UPS saying that it was in Laurel so it had traveled right back the way we had just come.

Around midnight I got another update from UPS saying our package had been in a "transportation accident" and we had visions of it on a desert island with Tom Hanks.  But this morning the tracking said it had arrived in Jackson, MS around 1:30am, so we are hoping it will still arrive sometime today at the documentation company in Fort Lauderdale.  One of the things that is in that envelope, by the way, is the paperwork to change the name of the boat.

After many hours of discussion and rumination, with hundreds of names considered, we have chosen Vector as the boat's name.  It derives from the Latin verb "to carry," which makes it suitable for a carrier of people, pets, and dreams, and it also has numerous meanings in navigation, computing, math, and science, which makes it suitable for a pair of geeks.  Our hailing port will be Bear, Delaware.  The blog will remain right here, though, as we will still be on our odyssey.

Today we will continue east on US-84 across the Tombigbee at Coffeeville, through the rest of Alabama, and past Dothan (hi, Debbie!) before ending the day somewhere near the Chattahoochee, which is the Georgia state line.  Assuming, of course, the road is not flooded between here and there, which is a distinct possibility if the river racing past us is any indication.

When blogs converge

 

We are parked on Salome Road near where it converges with Interstate 10, in Arizona (map).  This is further than I had planned to get yesterday, having expected to stop along AZ-72 northwest of its intersection with US-60, but even with the time change, it was too early to stop in that section.  Just as well, because we have good 3G coverage here near the Interstate and I had a number of boat-related phone calls to make this morning.

That leaves us just an hour and a half to Chandler today, where we have friends and will stop for the night.  On the way, we will fuel up, and possible swing by the motorcycle shop where we left our Honda Metropolitan scooter on consignment nearly four years ago.  We have not been able to reach them, and fear the scooter (and our money) may be gone forever.

A number of our readers have, apparently, been surfing over to the blog of our new boat's current owner, John.  Not surprising, since you all are a resourceful lot, and when Louise attached a photo of the boat to my blog post a few days ago, she used the unedited version with the boat's name clearly visible on the transom.  She chose the very same photo that I used when I first blogged about this boat back in November, but back then, I carefully erased the name, not wanting to jeopardize negotiations or otherwise jinx the deal.  (That did not stop a number of people on the bus boards from finding it anyway.)   It's really the best overall shot of her we have at the moment.

At any rate, John noticed the spike in hits there and posted a warm welcome to our readers, so those of you who have not already been over there might go check it out.  I read every word of his web site, and many of the posts two or three times, before we decided to make an offer on the boat.  He writes well, with a fairly dry sense of humor, and was very frank about the boat's weaknesses as well as strengths.  It gave us great confidence that we were buying a boat with no intentionally hidden issues, and one where the major issues that had already come to light were addressed in a professional and robust manner.

I think John was somewhat surprised that I spent so much time there, right down to remembering the nicknames of his crew.  The story of his self-delivery from where he bought the boat in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin to Dog River Marina in Mobile, Alabama (where we once spent several days repairing Odyssey), in particular, is well worth the read.

And to any of John's readers who clicked through his link to this blog, I also extend a warm welcome.  We will continue to blog our adventures, both bus and boat, right here in these pages, so if you were following the boat you can do so here.  Does anyone want to buy a bus?

Photo by mrlerone, used under a Creative Commons license.

New year, new boat

We are parked on the side of the road, where the trucks park, across from the Patterson Pass Business Park in Tracy, California (map).  There are no retail services here whatsoever, with the sole exception of a gas station with C-store and several diesel lanes at the corner of Mountain House Road.  The massive complex of buildings on both sides of the intersection here constitute the northern California distribution centers for many major retailers, including Costco, Jack-in-the-Box, and many more.

We're here because we wanted to have one last lunch with Louise's mom and dinner with my cousins on our way out of town.  We otherwise wrapped up in the bay area Wednesday with dinner in San Francisco, where Louise's cousins from North Carolina had just arrived for a conference.  Louise's dad and stepmom came up from Monterey for the occasion, as did another cousin from southern California, and so we got in five visits in one fell swoop.  New Year's Day was the regular Tuesday night dinner with the motorcycle crowd, and several turned out for our farewell dinner.

I had hoped to post here sooner than today, but we got incredibly busy once we landed back in the bay area.  We had a lovely Christmas dinner at my cousins' apartment in Oakley, and the delivery of Simon-the-dog turned out to be their best Christmas gift of all. He was so happy to see them -- we thought he was happy throughout the whole trip, but that was nothing compared to how excited he got when we walked through the door. Afterward we fell exhausted into bed in a nearby hotel room, and they ran us back to the bus, in the south bay, Wednesday morning.

Odyssey actually does fairly well parked by herself, and, near as I can tell, the generator did not even run in our absence other than the ten minute exercise period every other day. The solar panels kept the fridge cold and the air compressor running.  To be fair, we had spent the day before our departure at an Elks lodge, plugged in to 20 amps to top up the batteries.  It did take us a couple of hours to start everything up and extricate ourselves from our parking spot before heading out for a quick Boxing Day dinner with Louise's mom.  We spent the next couple of nights parked on the street.

Most of the week was spent cramming in farewell visits with a variety of folks, and dealing with the fallout of the various reports we had commissioned regarding the boat. By mid-week, however, the temperatures had dropped to the low 50s in the daytime, dipping into the 30s at night.  We were starting to spend more on fuel than it would cost for hookups, and we spent four nights at the Santa Clara Elks Lodge, a familiar stop for us, with 30-amp power to keep us warm.  We moved back to the street in Sunnyvale Wednesday morning so we could walk home from the train station after our visit in SF.

We also managed to fit in two whole days with my cousins, taking an excursion to Old Town Sacramento on the train, wherein we boarded in Santa Clara and they in Martinez, and a drive up the coast from Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay.  They will be full-fledged Californians in no time.  They also had some good news on the house front, and they now have a fully signed deal with a closing later this month; the bank had to drop the price based on appraisal.

Which brings me to our own bit of news.  By the messages I have been getting, lots of people are wondering about the boat and where things stand.  We had a solid two days of inspections when we were in Savannah, including about a three-hour sea trial, and the last of the reports came in while we were en route to California.  Not surprisingly, there are lots of problems.  Some of those we anticipated, and were already factored in to the offer we made.  Many others were new findings for us, and they meant going back to the negotiating table to sort them out.  The list is too extensive to detail here, but I will likely be sharing much of it in due course.

The good news here is that the seller is a genuinely nice guy and was entirely reasonable through the whole process.  When we arrived he was already in the process of having some issues with the boat addressed, and some of the more obvious defects that arose during the sea trial he is already having fixed.

We all agreed that the reports would come back so close to the holiday that we should extend the acceptance date to after New Years and push the closing back a week, to January 22.  Louise and I used a lot of the time in the car to talk through the findings and where we stood, and after Christmas we started working on the terms of a conditional acceptance.  The one issue that remained to be addressed was determining the source of some fuel in the lube oil that was discovered during sample analysis.

The mechanics finally looked at the engine on Wednesday of this week, having been off between Christmas and New Years.  They found no issues and recommended re-sampling after the boat had been run another 50 hours.  We factored this in with the other issues we had already discussed, and made a conditional acceptance, based on an additional discount off the agreed price, yesterday afternoon.  The seller agreed to our revised terms and it looks like we just bought ourselves a boat.  Formal closing will be sometime between the 15th and the end of the month.

Our departure from the bay area yesterday was predicated on trying to be in Savannah for a closing and delivery around the 22nd or so, with enough time to drive down to Fort Lauderdale for Trawler Fest on the 30th.  Now that the deal is done, we are very glad we said our final goodbyes and got on the road, because the seller could easily ask for a 1/15 closing, and then we'd own a boat that we couldn't get to for another week or so.  But all is well that ends well and we now have a comfortable two and a half weeks to cross the country.

We need to get rolling to make our mileage for today, but I will fill in more details about the boat here as time permits in the next couple of weeks.  I've been reluctant to post too much information here before the deal was done -- we learned from our previous oh-so-close experience not to get people (ourselves included) too charged up about a deal that might not close.

The dog watch

I am posting today from the road, quite literally.  Louise is driving and I've got the laptop out -- the only time I can get anything done with these long driving days.  We are in my cousin's SUV, rolling south on I-95 about three hours north of Savannah.

Thursday evening we tucked Odyssey away in a safe spot under some watchful eyes, and Friday morning we got a lift to the airport.  We had an uneventful pair of flights to LaGuardia, and I was surprised how empty the airports were so close to the holidays.  Our flights were not overbooked, either.  We had an on-time arrival just before midnight and headed for the hotel to crash.

We had a great afternoon and evening on Saturday with my aunt and uncle, my other first cousin, and some friends of theirs, Tommy and Maria.  And, of course, Simon the yellow lab.  Yesterday morning we got a relatively early start, stopping briefly for brunch with my parents in New Jersey before continuing south through Delaware, Maryland, and most of Virginia before stopping for the night in Emporia, where the Hampton Inn, which I could book on Hilton points, allows pets on the uppermost floor.

Traveling by car, especially on such an aggressive schedule, renews our appreciation for travel in Odyssey on a much slower pace.  Between a large dog taking up the whole cargo area, our suitcases taking up half the back seat, and a bunch of items left in the car that still needed to find their way to California taking up the other half, there is no room to even stretch out, and digging out lunch items, maps, or this laptop requires a bit of gymnastics.

We're also now very familiar with this stretch of road, but while we can tell you all the good spots to spend the night in an RV, where all the dump stations are, and how to find cheap diesel, we have no clue which towns have inexpensive and pet-friendly hotels.  We also get to see a different side of all the rest areas and visitor centers, and we've stopped at plenty to let the dog out.

Last night was our first hotel stay with the dog, and possibly the dog's first experience with an elevator, which seemed to baffle him.  But he travels well, and other than being always under foot, he's been no trouble in the hotel.  We'll spend the next three nights in a single spot, which will probably be a bit easier for him as well, giving all three of us a chance to get used to a routine and each other.

We had a little drama this morning relating to the boat.  Apparently, notwithstanding our broker having made arrangements with them to be on-site tomorrow at 10am, the marine diesel company we hired for the engine surveys called this morning to say they could not start at 10 -- we'd have to pay for them from 7:30 am or they would not take the job.  That would mean paying them for extra time to sit around until the boat splashed, but, more importantly, it meant some of the key players were in confrontation before we even started.  The broker found a different surveyor on short notice to come up from Jacksonville, but not before the angry phone call from the mechanics sent my blood pressure skyrocketing first thing in the morning.

All is back on track now, and we are on schedule to pick up our technical consultant from the airport this evening around 6.  Since the car is loaded to the gills, we need to get checked in to the hotel first and unload, so we have room.  The boat should already be out of the water as I am typing, and we start the survey tomorrow morning at 8am, on the hard.

I most likely will not get another chance to post until we are done in Savannah and on our way west.  I will try to get one more post in here en route, but if I don't get to it, we wish all our readers a very joyous holiday season.

Belated update

I know it has been over two weeks since last I posted here.  Some folks have speculated that the boat, which I described in that last post, has spelled the end of the bus and of updates here, but that's not the truth, which is much more prosaic.  The fact is, I've simply been too busy to write much, and, more importantly, there has not been much to write about.

Some time ago I committed to myself to blog every time we moved.  While lots of readers have appreciated that, it's really for more selfish reasons:  we wanted to have a record of every place we've been.  We do refer back to that record frequently, to remind ourselves of good parking spots or eateries or bus garages or what-have-you.  And the simple fact is that we have not "moved" in two months.  Sure, we keep moving every 72 hours to comply with local parking regulations, but in the past two weeks, we've been circulating among several spots which I have already well documented here since we arrived in early October.

Not having moved, except among those spots, there hasn't been much to document, and I'm sure that our readers do not otherwise need to hear about the daily minutiae of our lives (though lord knows, I've posted plenty of that on various occasions), such as where we've eaten or with whom we've been visiting.  All of that said, I should probably catch everyone up on the larger details, and what our plans are for the coming weeks, something which has been evolving slowly up to the past few days.

As I've written several times in the past couple of months, we have been lingering here principally to help my cousin get settled in to his new life in California, coming from upstate New York.  I am happy to report that his family finally arrived last Saturday, and they are all settled in to their temporary digs, with their boy having started school there on Monday.  There has been a fly in the ointment, however.

They were trying to buy a house in the delta area, on a short sale.  After waiting nearly two months for the bank to get its act together to close the deal, the bank instead decided to foreclose on the house, so the whole deal fell apart.  By circumstance, we were out at the apartment with him when the news came, helping to accept delivery of a new bed.  That was fortuitous, because it meant we could spend that afternoon driving around the neighborhood looking for alternative properties.

So three days later, on their first full day in California as a family, we all piled into the car to look at houses, a couple of which we had flagged that afternoon.  By the end of the day last Sunday they had made an offer on an alternative property, just a few doors down from their original bid, and yesterday they signed a contract.  That means we'll be in Oakley all day this coming Tuesday waiting on home inspectors, carpet cleaners, and the like.  With any luck they will be able to close before the end of the year, but if not, at least by mid-January.

Meanwhile, we solidified our plans to fly east, retrieve their dog, and inspect the boat.  We will fly out of San Jose this Friday morning, and leave New York for Savannah first thing Sunday.  Monday afternoon we should be in quarters there, having picked up our technical consultant from the airport.  We'll have the dog with us, so we'll be in pet-friendly hotels for the duration of the trip.

Tuesday should find the boat on the hard, having been hauled out Monday afternoon, and we'll start the day at 8am with the inspection of the hull, running gear, and other underwater items.  We should be splashed mid-day and head out on the sea trial, testing every piece of equipment on the boat.  Wednesday will be given to a detailed technical inspection of all the systems, from engines to electronics to toilets.

We booked our hotel in Savannah through Thursday morning, and that will give us just five days to make the drive all the way back to Oakley for Christmas dinner.  The good news is that we will be on the southern route at that point, so weather will not be as much a factor as if we had gone due west from New York.  As long as we are that far south, we will stop in Houston for a quick lunch with Louise's brother, his family, and, assuming their cruise ship docks in Galveston on time, her dad and stepmom as well.  There is no time in the schedule for us to linger past lunch, so whoever is not already on hand will be missed.  Part of our motivation here is that our eldest niece just announced her engagement a couple of weeks ago, and this will allow us to offer our congratulations in person and to hopefully meet the lucky gentleman.

I am hoping that the oil sample analysis and surveyors' reports will come in while we are on the road, and that we will be able to accept the boat (or know the reason why not) by the time we arrive in Oakley on Christmas.  If we do accept the boat, we have agreed to close the deal by January 15, which would mean a quick turn-around with the bus to head right back to Savannah on about a two-week timetable.  That's about as fast as we ever want to travel in the bus, barring heading to a major disaster someplace.

While we might close on the boat mid-January, our training captains will not arrive to train us on how to operate it safely until the second week of February.  So we've lined up some temporary dockage and a captain to help us move the boat there, and then we will probably head back off in the bus to take care of a few more loose ends.  For example, we have a line on a possible storage facility in Tennessee that we'd like to check out in person.  Also, we'd like to attend Trawler Fest in Fort Lauderdale at the end of January, and the bus is probably still the best way to do that, even with the round-trip mileage.

We should be back in Savannah in plenty of time to get moved aboard before our training cruise.  After that, it is a matter of getting Odyssey to her designated storage location before we sail motor off into the sunset.  Unless, that is, we manage to sell her before then, something that becomes less likely each day I put off getting the advertising copy written.

In any case, I intend to keep blogging right here, most likely even after we make the transition.  Once we get back on the road at the end of the month, you can expect me to once again blog from each new location, which will mean daily as we make our way back across the country to Savannah.  We will still be continuing on "our Odyssey," even though that will not be the name of the boat (and, no, we have not chosen one yet), so continuing to post here will be most appropriate.

I expect between now and then to be just as busy, no, busier, than I have been the past two weeks.  There are a thousand little details to be worked out, and many conversations to be had.  So you will not hear much from us for the next couple of weeks, either.  I will post here, though, if and when we accept or reject the boat.  It is important to keep in mind that this is not yet a done deal, and if the boat turns out to have show-stopping problems, we will be right back to our daily routine here aboard Odyssey until another suitable candidate comes along.

We bought a boat!

OK, more accurately, we have a contract to buy a boat, which is subject to our acceptance upon survey and sea trial.  This week has been a whirlwind of activity, and I'm exhausted.  I'm taking today off from any visits or meals out, and after I have had a chance to catch up on the blog and email I might get around to some projects around the house.

I am not entirely sure what possessed us to make an offer on a boat the Monday before Thanksgiving.  We've been ruminating about this boat for several months; we first noticed it on the market in July, just ten days after it was listed, and we rented a car to go see it.  As I wrote here at the time, it was priced too high for us to really consider it, but we put it on the watch list, knowing the price might well come down after it had sat unsold for a few months.  Sure enough, less than three months later, the seller dropped the price 10%.  Still not where we needed it to be, though, so we decided to wait and see if another price reduction might be in store, leaving open the possibility that it might be purchased out from under us.

We were OK with that, because this boat was not really the boat of our dreams, but still a good compromise that ticked off almost every check-box on our must-have list.  Importantly, it is the newest of all the boats we've seen, at just under ten years old.  In the ensuing months, the boat continued to grow on us, and several friends in the boating community suggested strongly that rather than wait for a price drop, we should just make our best offer whenever we were ready.  The thinking being that the seller might well turn us down up front, but after the boat sits unsold for another few months, with ongoing expenses and the other pressures of life, the seller might well call his broker back to ask, "Are those folks who made an offer still interested?"

Sitting here in the bay area for the past six-plus weeks, checking the boat market daily, we slowly came to the conclusion that the time was right for a low offer to be seriously considered.  What clinched the timing, though, was learning that our technical consultant, without whose serious inspection we would not be comfortable buying a one-off custom boat, was only available the week of December 17th, or else not until February at the earliest.  Even though our broker told us there was no rhyme or reason to the market around the holidays, we also felt that this time of year might also make a seller more receptive to offers on a boat that had been sitting unsold since the summer.  Thus it came to pass that we called the broker on Saturday and asked him to write the offer.  Ensuring we had the deposit ready to wire meant waiting until Monday to submit it, and we gave the seller until Wednesday to respond.

Frankly, I did not think we were going to head into Thanksgiving with a signed contract.  We offered just 81% of the asking price, which the seller rejected Wednesday morning, countering with 94%.  We told our broker our absolute top was 83%, and we figured it would end there, at least until the seller had a chance to sit through the holiday season with nary another looker.  So my jaw dropped when the broker called me back just 20 minutes later to say the seller had accepted.  I felt like the dog who chased after the bus, with no clue what to do once he caught it.

I'm sure you'd like to hear more about the boat.  I will be posting many more details once we've accepted the boat and the deal is complete -- regular readers will remember that we came very close once before, only to have the boat fall dramatically short on some technical issues.  However, I will share here the key points.

The boat is a one-off custom build, with a steel hull and aluminum superstructure, completed in 2003.  She's 52' long, 15' wide, and displaces (weighs) 85,000-100,000 pounds, with a tonnage of 66 Gross, 52 Net Registered Tons.  She's propelled by a single 300 horsepower diesel driving a conventional propeller and shaft ahead of a skeg-hung rudder.  A bow thruster allows for easy maneuvering of the single-screw boat at the dock, and hydraulic active-fin stabilizers minimize rolling at sea.  With 47.5 feet to the waterline and a full-displacement hull, she has an absolute top speed of 10 knots (11.5 mph), and a cruise speed of 8 knots. With 3,300 gallons of diesel fuel, her range at 7 knots is better than 6,000 nautical miles, more than enough to cross the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.  With a draft just under 5'10", she can traverse the Great Loop and make into most (but not all) of the nice anchorages in the Bahamas.

Below decks are two staterooms, each with a queen berth (bed) and en-suite head (bathroom).  Aft of the midships master stateroom is the engine room, accessed by a full-height watertight door.  On the main level are the modern and well-appointed pilothouse, the galley, and the salon.  On the upper deck is a flying bridge (outdoor control station), seating area, and storage for the tender and our two scooters, with a 1,000-lb crane for loading and unloading them.

While the timing was, apparently, excellent for having our offer accepted, it could hardly be worse for nearly everything else.  One of the keys to having the offer accepted was a fast closing, and so we need to sea-trial the boat the week of December 17th, and close the deal by mid-January.  Of course, the boat is on the east coast, and here we are in California.

The good news is that my cousin's family, on whose arrival we have been waiting, will be here December 1st, so we will get a chance to spend some time with them and get them settled in to their temporary apartment -- though it is looking unlikely that the house they are buying will close before we have to leave here.  As part of helping them with their very disruptive move across country, I had offered to fly to New York, and drive their elderly dog to California in their car, as flying the dog in cargo was judged too risky.  Absent the whole boat deal, I would have made that flight on Sunday the 2nd, arriving back here a week later.

With surveys and sea trials planned now for the week of the 17th, we are instead thinking about parking the bus, and flying to New York together around the 14th.  We'd get the dog and the car, then drive to Georgia to do the surveys, setting off for California the morning of the 20th.  That would put us back at our cousins' apartment in Oakley late on Christmas day.  We'd have only a couple of days, then, before we'd have to be back on the road to make the closing mid-January.  A tight schedule, to say the least.

Catching up on the last couple of weeks, we've been bouncing around the same industrial neighborhood in Menlo Park (map) since my last post, moving the requisite two-tenths of a mile every three days.  We like it here -- it's close to many of our friends, and with so many vacant buildings in the neighborhood, it's quiet and relaxing.  I did have to drive over to Trailer Villa last weekend to use their dump station, for a whopping $20.  (By contrast, we could have spent the night at the Fremont Elks for just $18, including power, and the dump station is included.)  At that price I put every last ounce of water into the tanks that would fit.  Worth it, though, as we only had to travel a mile or so round-trip from here.  Next time we'll try Docktown marina, another exit north on 101, as I've heard their dump is just five or ten dollars.

Today I will be working on installing WiFi and cellular amplifiers, technology we really purchased for the eventual boat (before we decided make the offer), because our current satellite solution will no longer be an option.  We thought we'd get the gear while we had a good delivery address here (plus access to Fry's), and set it up on Odyssey to get some experience with it before we needed it for real.  Had I known we were this close to a contact, I might well have waited until January.

Over the weekend I need to get cracking on finding a marina where we can park the bus nearby while we transition to the boat, and finding long-term storage for the bus.  We'd really rather sell it than store it, but below a certain price, it's worth more to us to keep it as our occasional land-based digs than to sell it, and the market is very soft.  That said, I'll also be writing up some listing copy, on the off chance that someone else will value the highly specialized design of Odyssey.

Back at the beach for some R&R

We are finally finished with the Red Cross relief operation for Tropical Storm Isaac here in Florida. Logistics wrapped up Monday afternoon, and after a mad scramble to tear down and empty what was left of Headquarters, we finally finished up around 7pm. The last half dozen cases of equipment missed the FedEx pickup, of course, so we loaded them into the back of our rented Prius and took them down to the FedEx customer center at the airport ourselves.

We didn't want to have ten grand worth of equipment sitting in the back of a rental car overnight, or even while we were at dinner, so we made the airport drop-off Monday evening, even though the gear was tagged for Tuesday shipment. That put us at a late dinner, and we just ran over to the nearby Olive Garden.

We would have just dropped the rental car off at the airport after FedEx, and maybe grabbed a bite at McCoy's before taking the hotel shuttle back home, except that we had agreed to hand off the car to another couple who had a mid-day flight Tuesday. It was too late to move the bus Monday evening anyway, and so we made arrangements to meet them for breakfast at 9am while handing off the car. We ended up just eating at the hotel, which was a bit pricey but certainly convenient. It was close to 11am by the time we finally got back to the bus and started preparing for departure.

We made our way directly here, marking I think the first time in our history with the Red Cross wherein we actually returned to our point of departure after a relief operation. More often than not, we've proceeded instead directly to another operation, or a special assignment, and if not we are usually just moving along to the next place on our global itinerary.

As soon as we arrived, our first order of business was to avail ourselves of the sewer cleanout to dump the tanks. We went 19 days without having to do this, a new record for us, and I think we even had capacity for another day. It helps that we were away from the bus fully 12 hours a day, using the restrooms at operation headquarters instead, and eating all of our evening meals out, with no dishes to wash.

While this was by no means our longest stint away from a power outlet, it did set a record for generator usage. We ran the generator 74 hours over the course of those 19 days, as we needed to have the air conditioning running whenever we were home. This would have been flat out impossible when our beloved Opal was with us, as the AC would have had to run 24/7, more than doubling the generator run time and making an RV park, no matter how distant, a more cost-effective option. The cats, on the other hand, love the warmth, and leaving the bus with just the windows open and fans running when we were not home was no problem for them.

It's good to be back on shore power and finally have the batteries fully topped up. And we're also almost back to normal on our own sleep schedules as well, although it took all of yesterday being complete slugs around the house to do it. I couldn't even muster the wherewithal to blog. I did, however, catch up on a number of long-outstanding emails, along with the fallout from a minor family medical emergency that happened just as we wrapped up in Orlando.

Now that we are all caught up, our attention has once again returned to our boat search. We just learned that the seller of the boat we looked at in Kentucky in July is highly motivated to sell it before he would otherwise have to winterize it. That boat was not tops on our list, but the price would be attractive -- the catch, however, being that we'd need to move quickly. That has lead us to contemplate making an offer on one or more of the boats higher up the list, so that the Kentucky boat can still be a viable backup if those offers are not accepted.

We've been waiting out the market on a couple of those, so this means we'd need to, as they say, fish or cut bait. That has set some wheels in motion for us, and even though we came here to relax for a while, we will most likely be hitting the road in just one week's time. Between now and then, our schedule is already filling up.

First up on the agenda is getting together with Chris and Cherie of Technomadia. They are en route from Savannah to Melbourne, and when they learned we would be in Cocoa Beach, they decided to swing by for a visit. They will be staying in nearby Cape Canaveral at Jetty Park, a lovely place which we had investigated a couple of years ago when we were planning for watching a space shuttle launch.

On Sunday we will head down to Vero Beach either in a borrowed car or on the scooters to have dinner with our good friends Captains Chris and Alyse Caldwell. In addition to being good friends and mentors, they are also our trusted advisors regarding many things nautical, and we want to chat them up about the various boats still under consideration.

On Tuesday we will again borrow or perhaps rent a car so we can head down to Palm Beach to look at another boat, and later in the week we will pull up stakes and head north to Savannah. One of the front-runners in our search is there, and while we've already been aboard, we'd like to have another look before possibly making an offer. We also have good friends in the area, and if our schedules align perhaps we can get together for dinner.

After that, things get fuzzy. We're considering heading to Baltimore for Trawler Fest at the end of the month, but that is by no means set in stone. We're pretty sure that we'll be staying somewhere here in the east, though, which means we will need to be making some flight reservations to be in the SF bay area in early October for our friends' wedding celebration. Getting a halfway decent fare means we will need to pretty much commit to a departure airport by this time next week at the latest.

I also now have a backlog of maintenance projects on the bus, and we need to get cracking on getting it listed for sale. We also need to be working on the backup plan, which is to find someplace to store it long-term, preferably indoors and climate-controlled. So much for a little R&R at the beach. We'll try to get in some swimming and maybe a massage while we are here, and I might even get another chance to blog before we leave town.

No boat, radio

We are at the Elks lodge in south Sarasota, Florida (map). The last time we were here, we were doing the same thing -- looking at nearby boats. This time, our broker was unable to come meet us, and arranged courtesy showings instead. On Monday we looked at a DeFever 52 in downtown Fort Myers, where parking the bus was a bit of a challenge, before coming directly here and getting squared away. The lodge offers two spaces with 30-amp power, but we've had the place to ourselves since arriving.

Yesterday we took the scooters out and rode the ten miles to the Sarasota Yacht Club on the Ringling causeway to look at a Cheoy Lee 55. As long as the scooters were already out, we also rode to dinner last night at a nearby Thai restaurant. I stowed the scooters well after dark, when it was a few degrees cooler.

Neither boat was in acceptable condition for us, especially for their asking prices. The Cheoy Lee was particularly disappointing, inasmuch as it had been apparently well maintained until a couple of years ago, after which all maintenance stopped abruptly and it's just been deteriorating slowly in the sun and weather -- a real shame. The DeFever was in slightly better condition, but still needed a ton of work, probably to include coring repair on the upper deck and possibly elsewhere.

Unfortunately, we have come to the end of our list. There are no more boats to see here in Florida, or, for that matter, anywhere in the southeast. We've added a couple of long-shot possibilities on the west coast (of the country, not Florida) along with two boats on the gulf coast, including the other DeFever 52, but nothing so far that warrants a mad dash cross-country in Odyssey nor even, probably, a round trip flight from Tampa or Orlando.

As disappointing as it is to be out of options for the time being, I think we are still testing the bottom of this market, by which I mean that used boat prices are not yet on their way back up, in spite of some increased sales activity which I attribute to more realistic pricing. So we do not feel any pressure to close a deal sooner rather than later, and we have the luxury of time on our side -- the right boat for us (at the right price) is still out there, and just has not come along yet. In time, either an acceptable, well-priced example of, say, the DeFever 52 will come on the market, or alternatively one of the boats we've had our eyes on will drop in price to a point where we think it fruitful to make an offer. Time will tell.

In the meantime, we are now somewhat at loose ends. We have no specific plans to look at more boats, and no specific destination in mind or commitments on the calendar until October. Nevertheless, we are on call this month and probably September as well for the Red Cross, so we are reluctant to move too far from hurricane alley. We need to regroup, and to that end we will head this afternoon to a location a bit closer to Tampa, so we can have dinner one evening at our club there and connect with friends while we hatch a new plan.

Photo by macieklew, used under a Creative Commons license.

Off Season

We are at John Prince County Park, in Lake Worth, Florida (map), just south of Palm Beach. I've been here before, when Louise had to fly back to California for a week. Unlike that visit, when I snagged the very last spot in a packed campground, the place is now deserted. We may be the only rig in the 30-amp, partial hookup area, and there are perhaps a dozen sites occupied throughout the entire campground. It's a nice park, with extensive facilities, and our site is $27 per night, plus tax. Sites near the lake or with full hookups are slightly more.

We had a very nice visit with Hank and Nancy aboard their well-kept DeFever 52 Offshore Cruiser Thursday afternoon, docked behind their house in North Palm Beach. After finally seeing one, we are definitely very interested in this model, and so we will make our way to the two of them currently on the market, both reportedly in rough condition, to see if either one can be made to work for us. We had a nice conversation after our brief tour, which might well have lasted into the evening, but we were nervous about our parking situation and so excused ourselves to get back on the road.

I'm glad we got rolling when we did. From their house we drove about a half hour to the Elks lodge in West Palm Beach, a place we've stayed before and where we knew there were three spaces with 15-amp power outlets. When we pulled in to the lot, there was already one rig there, hooked up and looking to be long-term. We pulled in to the designated spot, hooked up to an available outlet, and went inside to register and have a beer.

When we asked about parking, we were told they could no longer offer overnight RV parking. Apparently the county came in and cited them, giving them a few days to get all the RVs off the property or face fines of $3,000 per day per rig. The county agreed to allow one rig for "security" purposes which accounts for the one that was there when we arrived. The lodge told us that there had been seven rigs in the lot when the county showed up, so things had gotten a little out of hand -- my notes said they had three spaces. Of course, Palm Beach County also runs this campground, so maybe they just didn't want the competition.

Fortunately I remembered this park just six miles away. In fact, I had stayed here for a week because that same Elks Lodge had a two-night stay limit -- the lodge was much more convenient to the airport, where I had to drop off and pick up Louise. It's too bad we had to move along, because we had just sat down at the bar and were looking forward to a cold draft beer. Oh well -- scratch another one off the list. Long-time readers may recall this happened to us in Stuart and Lake Placid, as well, and it may not be long before most of the lodges in Florida stop offering overnight parking.

Yesterday our friends and brokers Curtis and Gill drove up from Fort Lauderdale and picked us up to go look at yet another boat, ironically in North Palm Beach just a couple of blocks away from where we were Thursday. This one was an older Nordhavn 46, and we actually had fairly low expectations. We were quite pleasantly surprised, and have put this specific boat on our list of contenders. It's a twin, uncharacteristic for this model which is typically outfitted with a single, and the twin configuration actually makes for more room in the engine room, as the walkway down the center is lowered into the keel. The fuel tanks are smaller, however, which makes the range a bit short for our preference.

With boats dropping off our list left and right, we are down to just a single prospect in Fort Lauderdale, and it's such a marginal candidate (too little fuel, too little headroom in the engine room, little room on deck for tender and scooters) that we've decided to skip it, saving 80 miles or so of driving. Instead we will head west from here, to look at two boats on the west coast (of Florida). I expect we will end up at yet another Palm Beach County park tonight, in South Bay on Lake Okeechobee. We'll wait there until we hear from Curtis about scheduling a DeFever 52 Offshore Cruiser in Fort Myers.

Relaxing on the coast

We are in Cocoa Beach, on Florida's "Space Coast" where the area code is three, two, one, just like a rocket countdown. No map link today in consideration of our host, who generously provides us will full hookups when we come to visit. We are just a block from the beach, and we also have access to a pool, hot tub, laundry, and a half dozen restaurants in easy walking distance. Two of those happen to be fantastic Italian places, and we've patronized both since arriving here Thursday afternoon. We also pulled the scooters out and rode down to a nearby resort for half-price massages, courtesy of Space Coast Coupons, a site I highly recommend for anyone visiting.

I was surprised to find the sea temperature to be a bit low for comfort, as it was nice the last couple of times we visited. The pool is nice and warm, though. We've been using our time here to recharge our batteries -- both literally and figuratively. Other than the couple of excursions to the beach and the pool, we've been mostly staying inside the bus and catching up on email, boat searching, and the last remaining hiccups from our domicile change to South Dakota. In the evening after the sun sets it is cool enough to take a walk, either before or after cocktails on the roof deck. As always, a very pleasant stay.

In keeping with the recent theme of boats disappearing from the market just as we try to see them, the boats we had lined up in the Treasure Coast area south of here are now off the list. The one that we really wanted to see is on the hard and unavailable for viewing, so the listing broker is pulling the listing. Two other boats, which we have already seen but we thought might be worth a second look, do not warrant a trip from Fort Lauderdale for our broker. Ironically, one of the boats that we had to wave off in Jacksonville because it was "under contract" is now back on the market, which really ticks me off because we asked (through our broker) the listing broker if we could get aboard anyway -- contracts fall through all the time -- and he said no. Really short-sighted on his part -- we've decided it's not worth renting a car and making a five-hour round trip to see it from here.

I spent a good part of yesterday combing through Yachtworld again. I'm trying to avoid the same mistake I made in Savannah by not searching deeply enough before we moved along -- you may remember reading that we ended up renting a car in Jacksonville and driving back to Savannah for the day to look at a boat that, had I done the work ahead of time, we might have seen before we left town. Also, as many prospective candidates are now off the list, we need to re-fill the pipeline with some fresh prospects. That will also shape our route plans, at least unless and until we get called to a disaster.

Several people have asked just exactly what kind of boat we are looking for, and why it requires gallivanting all over the country. That's a great question, and other than resorting to Potter Stewart's famous quote, "I know it when I see it," it's hard to answer concisely. So much so that it probably warrants its own post, which I will try to get to over the next few days. I think we manage to confuse even our broker sometimes, as the variety of boats we ask him to show us can seem all over the map, but rest assured there is a method to our madness.

While the boats on the Treasure Coast are off the table, we still want to visit our good friends there, Captains Chris and Alyse Caldwell of Captain Chris Yacht Services. Regular readers may recall that we spent Christmas with them last year, and that Louise and our good friend Stephanie took a week-long training cruise with them. We always enjoy their company, and our schedules happen to mesh, so we have arranged to meet them for dinner on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the only reasonable overnight option with power will be a mobile home park a few miles away, who were reluctant to take a one-night guest, but I managed to convince them.

From there we will head south to Palm Beach, where a member of the DeFever Cruisers group has offered to show us his DeFever 52 Offshore Cruiser Thursday afternoon. This is a model we are seriously considering, but only 17 or so were ever built. His is not for sale, but having a look will inform us whether or not we should go to great lengths to pursue them when they do come on the market. There are two on the market at this writing, but all reports are that both are somewhat rough and have suffered some neglect.

Once in Palm Beach there are two other boats we'll try to see -- assuming our luck changes and they don't drop off the market before we even get there. From there we will likely head all the way to Fort Lauderdale, where we have friends we'd like to visit along with one more boat to see, long shot though it is.

Photo by Scott Ableman, used under a Creative Commons license.