We get questions all the time, “Where are you?” We are now back at the boat in Deltaville VA. The same spot we seem to leave the boat when we head back to New Mexico (it always has a long list of repairs to complete while we are gone). We headed back March 10^th after spending nearly 4 months at “the big house.”. We’d wanted to leave earlier but had two apartments which need renovations, not for being trashed, just because it was time. It took us nearly two months, but they are done and rented!

While we were home, we also completed the sale of two apartment buildings and put the rest of our property into management. Yeah! Takes a big day-to-day load off our plate.

The day we left was expected to be one of the big storms of the year. Winter came late to New Mexico this year, not really starting until February. In our back and forth travels we’d never had to deal with snow. This one did not hit as hard as expected and by noon, the roads were clear.

We needed that time to finish packing in any case and managed to leave around 4 PM!

We took 3 ½ days getting to the boat. Not terribly long days, but the kittens do get tired in the car, as do we. We brought our truck this time to haul stuff to the boat and the truck cab, even though it is a crew cab is pretty cozy with two cats and a cat box.

We arrived around mid day in Deltaville after a stop to pick up plumbing parts at Home Depot in Richmond 80 miles away. Task one after getting the kitties oriented was to get the water working. The boat was winterized and thus anything that could freeze had been removed and all the water lines for any purpose had been drained and flushed with vodka (tastes better and not more expensive.) Jim needed/wanted to make some changes to the water system to make it easier to winterize (it had been a long and arduous process before) and also to make some maintenance easier by re-pluming the hot water heater and and adding valves in various places. A day and a half later, we have water!

The most essential out of the way, we begin to bring the boxes the marina has been storing back to the boat, making lists of food to buy, figuring out the next task and installing the new refrigerator. The old refer still worked but was 20 years old. Jim wanted a somewhat more efficient model and we found one a little bigger that would fit without changing the cabinetry. We’d bought it in Albuquerque, thus one of the big reasons for the truck and trailer this trip.

The list of work is still long… While we were gone, we had the cushions in the salon (living room), our bedroom (state room) and pilot house recovered. They were all original and the foam was getting soft and the cushions just dated. We came back to wonderful new cushions! I’ve been busy making pillows which did not get completed at home for a variety of reasons. So lots of boat sewing, cutting, etc.

Not quite done yet, but close. Awaiting some backing fabric and then I’ll complete the pilot house pillows. They have turned out really well (at least I think so!) but I’ll wait until they are complete to show you the pillows along with upholstery.

I should not forget the watermaker. The watermaker is our own little boat-sized desalinization plant. Ours was not working very well and was impossible to do maintenance on. It weights over 100 pounds and lives in the engine room, always a tight space to work in and get things in and out. Jim took it home and completely rebuilt it, creating some brackets to move some of the parts out of the compact housing to make it serviceable while in place.

It is now back in place but him has to have a couple of high pressure lines made and finish the install.

We are also upgrading our communications on the boat. There are lots of communications on a boat, this is our personal comms, basically access the the internet. Now this is not so hard at home but harder on a boat that moves all the time and is commonly in places without a good signal. For those who care, our “device” is a router (just like your home router that takes a signal and makes it available to you throughout your home). But also has two sim cards (just like in a cell phone) so we can get signal from two different carriers allowing us to change carriers (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile…) easily depending on who has the best coverage. We can also grab wifi signal from a marina, coffee shop if we were close enough, etc. and rebroadcast that in the boat. The part that is nice, we are just logged into our “boat” wifi which does not care where we are getting our internet. All this wrapped into one small, expensive package. This new one is 5G capable and can talk to MANY more frequencies so our ability to get signal just about anywhere is greatly improved. We are also replacing our antennas (these are BIG antennas with multiple antennas in one to actually talk to multiple towers simultaneously for a better signal) which also enhances our ability to get a signal when there is basically none.

We are changing the location where we install the router so it can be closer to the antennas (so you don’t loose all the signal over long wire runs, a big problem for this sort of system. So, Jim is constructing a little housing to mount the router in a clean, tidy, secure and serviceable manner in the pilot house. Almost done. Along wit this, we have to move several antennas on the roof, remove one and fill excess homes.

Are you tired yet??? We still need to install the solar panels on the pilot house, bimni and dinghy along with their controllers (one needs and wants a quieter form of energy generation that does not burn fuel), do a few updates to our electrical bonding system and enhance our boat communications system so our navigation systems can talk more effectively to each other and the new weather station we are installing (NMEA 2000 for those in the know). This is about 3 weeks work. Then, we’ll head to Florida to have the cap rails re-painted on the boat. This should be about a week long process.

The cap rails are teak and were painted back in about 2013 by a previous owner to lower maintenance. A common practice. Unfortunately, these were not correctly primed before painting. They have done pretty well, but the first winter in freezing temps for several months has caused the paint to loose grip to the teak. Luckily, a boating friend has just had his done and the guy who did them can do ours. Mostly a pricy cosmetic issue, but one that HAS to be addressed.

There are other little tasks along the way but we are HOPING to be able to head to the Bahamas by early May. Later than we’d hoped, but even if we just get a short visit, it will be worth it to get a taste.

Now, back to work!