Back Home, For Now
The Catamaran Delivery is complete, and I am back home, settling back into my routine here in RI. However, I am also deep into planning our next steps, with laptops and charts and books all around as we do so.
We are moving through the purchase process for our next boat; we’ll share more if and when things wrap up on it. In the meantime, we are also preparing our lives for significant change. Assuming things go as expected, we’re going to move onto said boat over few months, do some upgrades and updates, and then head out cruising. If surprises arise during the survey and following steps, we have a number of backup options I looked closely at over these past months, and we’ll simply push our plans out by a few months.
In either case, we intend to depart New England soon.
In October, we sold our home - which we’d owned since 2012 - and have begun the process of paring down, selling off, and minimizing. We worked more or less nonstop between August and October, racing to empty out nearly everything in preparation for the sale. We had good luck and a great agent, and sold in under 2 weeks from listing, but there were months of backbreaking work on either side of the process.
It was, to say the least, not fun.
The final moments in our old home.
We rented a beach bungalow near Newport, RI, and have it until April 30. We sold Wanderer a few weeks ago - which really means that Joy did so, per her post - and now what’s left is to condense three storage units into one or none. We’ve shifted our careers around greatly, and both of us can work remotely; as we look ahead, we’ll be living and cruising full-time. My schedule is a good bit more flexible, and I can dedicate nearly all of my time to boat handling; Joy will be seeing patients, but with Starlink on board, we can do so from essentially anywhere.
And anywhere is open-ended for us. We may bring the boat (which is down south) back to New England for next hurricane season, or we may hole up in the Rio Dulce; we may spend the winter in the US, or we may sail to the Bahamas to shake her down. For now, though, we’re enjoying RI, and the opportunity to divest ourselves of much of what we no longer need.
The Black Pearl, Newport, RI.
Second Beach, Middletown, RI
Enjoying a couple of pints and the fireplace at The Fastnet Pub.