When we set our launch date as June 20, we did it based on the sale of our house.  We thought our boat would be fixed by this date after our lightning strike in March. We gave that date to the contractor dude… Have everything fixed by June 20. But the closer we got to launch day, we knew the boat wasn’t going to be fixed. We tried not to panic, even though we were definitely annoyed.  The whole reason we wanted it all fixed was so that the haul out would be done BEFORE we moved everything we owned aboard. Sigh.

Knowing it wouldn’t happen before launch day, we assumed that at least all would get done in the next seven weeks we planned to still be in Texas. (We had one last lakehouse vacation with family in mid-July on the books, and we were selling our cars to our friends the first weekend in August.) And then… as soon as the weather looked good for crossing the Gulf of Mexico… we would hoist our sails and start this new life!

Plenty of time. Just a few things to tidy up, really. That’s all…

Today is August 15. Halfway through August.

And our mast is not attached to our boat at the moment.

You know… I’m not a lifelong sailor. But I did survive sail school. And I am like 99% positive that the mast has a pretty important job in the “hoist our sails” portion of “start this new life.”

If I had a nickel for every time someone asks, “is the boat finally fixed?” We might actually be able to afford all the stuff we’ve recently purchased/will be purchasing. Right now, I’m wearing my $15,000 t-shirt the rigging people gave us for all the business we’re giving them. It’s nice.

So, what’s the hold up?!

Glad you asked… Here’s a little long breakdown of what’s been going on:

June 20 – we moved aboard! Whoo-HOO! We LAUNCHED!

Technically, Matt and the boys moved aboard on Friday, June 17. I stayed and had one last garage sale on Saturday, June 18. Met the cleaning lady on Sunday morning, June 19, for a move-out deep clean and then drove to Dallas that evening. Dropped our final load at storage, and made one more trip to safety deposit box on Monday morning, June 20. Then I drove seven hours to meet Matt and the boys at the boat to officially “launch” our new life!!

Meanwhile, Matt had been on the boat with the boys, a dog, and a cat, for three days at this point. SWEATING THEIR ASSES OFF, with no contractor dude in sight. And on June 20, LAUNCH DAY, BABY!!, the power cord – which had been powering the portable air conditioning units for three whole days – FRIED. Dead. Kaput. As I remember it, Matt called me about half-way into my seven-hour drive to tell me, “We are getting a hotel because we are all going to die of heatstroke on the boat because we have no air conditioning. It’s dead. This whole idea was stupid. It is June in Texas, and we’re on a boat in a marina with no air conditioning. Maybe you shouldn’t even come here.”*

AWESOME!! Yay! Can’t wait! Launch day, baby!! 

The next three hours on the road were as fun as you would expect.

* This was (I think) the first time the dream was over according to Matt. (There is another… keep reading.)

What I didn’t know…

…is that after we hung up, Matt ran a gajillion errands back and forth the 30 miles one-way to West Marine & Home Depot (a couple of times because you never get the right part the first time, amirite?) And by the time I got to the boat, Matt had the portable a/c working. We did NOT have to spend our “launch day” in a hotel, but the fun Launch Day excitement was more like Yippie effing kai yay! We sold our house so we can live on a boat in Texas in summer with a crappy ass portable a/c that may blow at any moment! So we did what any responsible blogging family does – posted our happy pic to Facebook!! We LAUNCHED!!!

June 22

As part of our lightning strike, our batteries were fried, and emitting the most horrible toxic smell/fumes from under the master bunk. Like everything else, they weren’t fixed yet. But now that we were living on our boat, the fumes were too much. They needed to be replaced ASAP. So we opened up the hatch in our cabin to let it air out… and Matt and I moved into Austin’s aft cabin (same size as ours) and made the boys share the smaller forward cabin. Oh, the horror!

The contractor dude said he would install the batteries today. He didn’t.

June 23

The contractor dude showed up to install the batteries, finally. He was SHOCKED, shocked I tell you, that we were already living on the boat. Really, dude? We TOLD YOU WE WANTED EVERYTHING FIXED BEFORE JUNE 20 BECAUSE WE WERE MOVING ONTO THE BOAT THEN! Grrrr….

Anyway, they installed the new batteries!! Those suckers were HEAVY. Holy cow. It took 3 grown men to move the old batteries off the boat and install the new ones. They had to take out four 100 lb batteries from under our bunk and replace with three 150 lb batteries. We now have more capacity in our three batteries than we had in the four we had originally.

Guess what wasn’t installed on June 23? Everything else.

June 24 – July 10-ish

The weeks all blur together, but every week contractor dude would show up with one item, and tell us the rest should be here next week. He would then show up the next week with one more item, and tell us the rest would be in next week. We heard “next week” way too many weeks in a row…

We finally put our foot down and said, “Everything MUST BE FIXED by July 13 because we need to haul out on July 14 before we go out of town to the lakehouse vacation.”  Contractor dude said OK. He would get it done by July 13. We were proud of ourselves. We were about to get shit done.

July 13

Contractor dude showed up with go-up-the-mast dude (and two other people that I’m sure we paid for) in the morning to install our steaming and anchor lights, radar, wind instruments, and VHF antenna. Around lunchtime, we were informed that 1) the radar mount for the old radar wouldn’t work with our new radar unit, 2) that he couldn’t get wires into the mast and we would need to un-step the mast (take the mast off) in order to run wires for all of those parts I just mentioned, and 3) that we had some maintenance issues we should take care of while the mast was off.

OMFG.

I think every curse word known to man was probably thrown out there because 1) HOW THE EFF DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT KIND OF MOUNT WE NEED FOR THE NEW RADAR YOU IDIOT CONTRACTOR DUDE WHO IS THE ONLY EFFING APPROVED DEALER OF OUR PARTICULAR BRAND, AND THE ONLY REASON WE HAVE PUT UP WITH YOU FOR THE PAST FOUR MONTHS? 2) WTF?! WHY DIDN’T YOU KNOW THAT WE COULDN’T GET WIRES IN/OUT OF THE MAST ALREADY? YOU’VE BEEN HERE EVERY WEEK FOR THE LAST FOUR EFFING MONTHS??, and 3) I HATE EVERYONE, but how/where/when can we get our mast pulled so that we can get all of this done!?!

We called the place hauling us out to see if they could also step the mast… YES! Okay, great! Let’s just get it done while we are gone. But contractor dude tells us that we have to get this other dude (not the up-the-mast-dude) to install and fix everything, although the other dude is not the best mast guy in the area, he’s the only one available… and oh, by the way, he doesn’t work at the yard where you are getting hauled out. You know, the only yard in the area that has the capacity to haul you out? Yeah… you won’t be getting your mast stepped there…. You’ll have to take your boat over to another yard after you splash and then let them work on it for two days while you find somewhere else to stay.

okay, fine, whatever, just book it. 

July 14

We unloaded almost everything we had just unpacked onto our boat less than a month before. All perishable food – liquor, snacks, refrigerated stuff – all dirty clothes and linens (so we could wash it all), all computers and electronics, all pet stuff for the kennel… and loaded it into both of our cars.

I left Matt and Kade mid-morning to head to the kennel 30 miles away and then planned to meet them at the yard after they motored over, drive back to the marina to get Matt’s car, and then we were all headed to Austin.

Matt texted me around 11:30 am that we had a major a problem with the port engine – alarms were going off and he couldn’t find the cause and he didn’t know how long it would take to fix the alarms.

AWESOME! 

Fast forward three hours… Matt was done. It was miserably hot…  He had been down in the engine for three hours. He could not get the alarms to stop going off. And he was not about to take an already disabled boat 10 miles to the yard with engine alarms going off. So he just cancelled everything. Cancelled the haul out. Cancelled the mast stepping. Cancelled our sail around the world adventure.**

**Just kidding. But this is at least the second time our adventure was over, according to Matt. 🙂

We left the boat at the dock, and headed to Austin to begin our lakehouse vacation… and pretty much didn’t talk about the elephant in the room the entire night.

July 15 – July 19

Lakehouse weekend trip in Austin. We enjoyed air conditioning. We did free laundry. We made a video.

We played and drank and spent time on jet skis and power boats and visited with friends and family.

And we didn’t talk about the boat the entire weekend…

July 20 (one month after launch day and FOUR months after lightning strike)

We had had enough of contractor dude. We needed a new plan. I called some riggers in Kemah to see if they could come to Port Aransas to help us… they suggested we try to get the boat to Kemah. But how? We don’t have any instruments? Nothing was installed yet – that’s why we needed a rigging company!

But our friends on The Riot were heading that way the weekend of July 30. Maybe we could buddy boat with them? So we made plans. We were going to motor up to Kemah to get our boat fixed.

July 21 – July 29

Matt figured out how to rig up some temporary instruments for us. He zip tied our VHF antenna to the bimini, rigged up a temporary depth sounder to our transducer so we could see depth, and installed cell and wifi boosters. He also got our chartplotter up and running. MATT. DID. IT. Not crappy contractor dude.

 

We booked the cherry picker (crane) to pull the mast on Tuesday, Aug 2 at 9 am, followed by a 1 pm haul-out. We had three days to get to Kemah if we left Saturday, July 30.

Matt drove his car up to Kemah and left it at the marina so we would have a car when we got there. He flew back and we picked him up in my car.

Our friends on The Riot decided they weren’t leaving until Sunday, July 31… but with all of the instruments working that we needed to motor up, we decided to go without them.

July 30 – August 1

We left early Saturday morning. We motored the whole way to Kemah. Good thing because there was no wind for most of the trip. We saw dolphins. We drank coffee and watched the sunrise.

Our first stop on Saturday night was in Matagorda Harbor Marina. Tons of people partying after a big fishing tournament. We stopped Sunday night in Galveston at Moody Gardens Marina, and took advantage of all of the fun stuff for the boys – water park, kids movie night, hotel pool. We left late on Monday and arrived in Kemah around 5pm. Docked the boat. Packed up and unloaded all of our stuff again. And headed to hotel with two dogs and cat.

August 2

The yard pulled the mast off at 9 am. They hauled our boat out of the water at 1pm. THEY RUN A TIGHT SHIP here in Kemah. I think I shed a tear at the efficiency.

August 3-4

GIRO got a fresh coat of paint. Also, new transducers and new zincs.

The riggers did a full inspection on the mast and rigging. And then they promptly gave us a quote to repair all of the maintenance issues, “since the mast is already down.” The maintenance issues were TWICE the cost of the lightning strike issues. But when a rigger says you have a crack, or something is broken, or pretty much says anything – you immediately think of worst case scenario. Do we really want to be in the middle of the ocean wondering if our rigging will hold up? So we gave them all of our money to fix all of the issues.

August 5

We splashed! With no mast. And headed to our slip at the marina. We dropped off our life raft to get serviced because we were about to be car-less the next week. But they informed us they wouldn’t look at it until next week. So that worked out well.

August 6-7

Our friends flew into town to buy our cars! We went to NASA. And spent time at Kemah boardwalk. And then said goodbye to our transportation.

August 8-10

All of our parts were supposed to arrive at the riggers so they could get our mast ready to step.

August 11

The life raft service center called. Our life raft was condemned. It wouldn’t hold air. Well, that sucks. We aren’t going to cross the Gulf of Mexico without a life raft. So, we started shopping for a new life raft. HOLY MF!!! Ahem. Those suckers aren’t cheap.

But guess who’s buying a new life raft!?

August 15 – TODAY (eight weeks after launch day)

Riggers say that they are waiting on one part that is on backorder. So, we aren’t getting our mast back until next week.

SIGH.

 

tl;dr: The answer to the question “Are we sailing around the world yet?” is a BIG. FAT. NO.