Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Work to be done this Easter weekend...




Top photo shows the huge gouge on the bow, to be repaired Friday or Saturday. The second photo shows our wet/dry vacuum hose in the hole where a thru-hull blank was fitted. The fitting was leaking a touch so the wife and I decided to glass over the whole hole. The white is the tapered fiberglass ready to be epoxied. The third photo shows the hole before being prepped. Notice the water stain running down? We figured if water can run out when on the hard, then water can ingress when afloat. More pictures after the weekends work is done.


Thursday, March 25, 2010

Money!

Had a very rough day at work and seriously thought about quitting and sailing away! Not going to happen today. I need the second pension available to me when I'm 55. Plus I need a larger boat.

I'll have about $1,500 after taxes then, not much when on land but I figure slowly moving around the globe, living off the hook as much as possible, wearing very little clothing to save on laundry soap:), we should be able to swing it.

What will be a huge help is just getting away from our consumer driven society! Cruising by its very nature is a frugal lifestyle, I mean, you only have so much room on board to hoard (Hee, hee, board and hoard rhyme) your purchases.

One flaw in that is that both the wife and I are voracious readers. We love our books. Maybe Kindle or some other electronic reader will help us out, we'll see.

We have two major expenditures coming up. First and foremost is our daughters university tuition. We will pay for her first degree, and only her first degree, any further edumafacation will be at her expense. The second expense will be upgrading our boat to a larger one.

We have a friend, well actually he is my sailing guru, who insists that we need a 40' boat at least. he's probably correct, as he is on most things. This leads back to the money thing....the bigger the boat, the more expensive the equipment becomes. Prices remain reasonable below 38'. So as frugal sailors he will have to swallow his shame when we raft up beside him in our toy boat. His palace is 46' long. But as I tell my wife, size isn't everything:)

Yup, I see a lot of canned stew and Kraft dinner in my future, and cheap Caribbean rum:)
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