Letting Go

  The definition of "unmoor" is to release the moorings of a vessel. I didn't know that until today, but it's what we have been in the process of doing over the last few months.

  My last blog mentioned hanging some of our pictures on the walls of Swing Set. We only have room for a hundred of them or so, but I found out that in our files there are nearly 10,000 of them. Obviously, we don't have room for all of them, and naturally, we wouldn't want to have room for all of them. They are not all pictures we'd want to keep anyway.

  I have scanned all of our photos and will begin scanning all of our documents to file on the computer. So what if the boat sinks or burns and we lose the computer? The solution has come in the way of a program called Mozy. We chose to install MozyHome on our desktop. I'm not giving a tutorial here, or a recommendation, but just some simple facts. For 50GB of memory on one computer, with a two year sign up, it amounts to about $5 per month. We'll not need that much memory, but we can add 20GB for another $2 per month if we do.

  This way, we can access our account from any computer with our password and restore our photos and documents should we have a failure. We do have a backup hard drive, but should we have a catastrophic event, the external hard drive would be ruined along with the computer. This has provided some peace of mind for us.

Making Swing Set a Home

  I took this shot of the Mississippi River at dawn on the morning we left the harbor for a trip up the Illinois River to Peoria back in 1999. It's one of our favorite pictures and until last week, it hung in a hallway of our condo, an area we called "the gallery". That's sort of a snobby way of saying "picture wall", but the fact that the "gallery" consisted of over 100 photos in an odd collection of frames gives away the joke.
  As we are getting closer to the time to move onto the boat, last week I bit the bullet and removed all the pictures from our home and hauled them up to Swing Set.
 

  The sunrise picture got laminated and placed in a frame and I mounted it on a wall near the dinette, but in order to get more pictures on the boat, I laminated the small ones and eliminated the frames and began sticking them to a bulkhead in our office as you can see in the above picture. You might be able to see the laminating machine on the desk, we bought it last winter just for this purpose, but we also intend to laminate any charts that we print off of the web if we want to keep them.

Questions? We Got Answers.

  We drove up to check on Swing Set last Sunday, something we try to do regularly during the winter months. We keep some space heaters on low to keep the chill off, so we turned them up a little to make it more comfortable. A mild winter has kept the ice eater from running too much, but a couple of space heaters running even on low has run up the electric bill some. We spent time hanging some photos and stowing some supplies before we relaxed and discussed our "plans".
  Rosie and I have taken our puppy Holly up to the boat several times this winter. She's getting used to her new digs on the boat. Stairs were foreign to her when we first took her on the boat, but she is getting better at negotiating the steps with each visit. Going up them is definitely an easier task than going down. She seems to be right at home with her new "potty place" in the shower stall of the day head; it's outfitted with a smaller version of a potty pad holder that she has at home. Next month she goes in for her surgery to make her an equal in the "spay and neuter" department with the rest of her crew members. (We can all set together and stare into space for hours at a time.) She should be healed up and accustomed to life aboard her new home by the time we cast off.
  We have a friend in Florida who has just been introduced to our blog and who had a whole list of questions for us in a recent email. Some of the answers to her questions will be found in the contents of the blog as she reads them, but because I found one or two of them fairly interesting myself, I thought I'd address them here, even though I'm not real fond of a lot of questions.

The Herd Mentality

  We all wonder about ourselves some times, but who doesn't wonder about other people more than they wonder about themselves? What I wonder about is my capabilities to be able to accomplish what I set out to do. The other thing I wonder about more is how other people ever accomplish anything, and certainly there are others that wonder that same thing about us.
  Since starting this blog, I've had countless people remark that they had no idea that we were capable of some of the things we've done. I guess that question is legitimate. Most of our friends only see us lounging on the boat or at a party with a Bud Light in our mitts. We tend to keep our work time and play time separated by a large degree.
  Which brings us to our preparation and past experience in regard to our present endeavor.    Experience is the best teacher, but you have to start somewhere. A friend and I embarked on a canoe trip on the Meramec River back in 1972. My dad drove us out to Meramec State Park, 105 miles or so up river from our destination of Fenton, MO. Our canoe was loaded to the gills with enough camping gear and Vienna sausages to last us for a week or so; we had little idea how long the trip was going to take. We had no phone, or any other form of communication, but we did have a map, so identifying nearby towns and roads was possible. I was positioned in the stern of the canoe and my buddy sat at the bow as my dad shoved us off the bank into the swift spring waters of the upper Meramec River. I'll never forget the look on my dad's face as the canoe spun in circles in the swift current as we were engaged in our first lesson in piloting a double ended canoe.
  Three long days later we arrived at our destination with some experience under our belts. Some lessons I learned on that trip was: most importantly, how to steer a canoe; don't pitch a tent in a low lying area when it's raining; keep an eye on your travel partner that they don't eat all the sausages when you aren't looking; don't man the front of the canoe, as this person is always paddling and can't see the person behind them, (see previous item); wear gloves when paddling for long periods; and don't pick an idiot for a travel companion, (not sure even now which one of us this lesson applied to).
  Two of the books I've read in preparation for cruising full time aboard Swing Set involved people with little, or no experience for the mission that had chosen. One couple embarked on the Great Loop with little more than some basic instruction from the broker they had purchased their vessel from. They learned fast and were also lucky, but they accomplished the trip and were able to keep their marriage in tact.
  Another couple, with only some inland lake sailing experience, bought a sail boat and circumnavigated the globe, a remarkable accomplishment for even the most experienced sailor.
  There is a term for what these types of people who have done what they did with little experience and some might say they were foolhardy. One trait I think they possessed was the trait of self-confidence, and the ability to think on their feet under less than perfect circumstances. As Rosie and I meet people along our way, it's these self-confident, independent types that we will most value advice from.

More On House Cleaning

  I took a bunch of supplies up to the boat yesterday; the load consisted of all the freeze dried packs of towels and stuff that we had vacuum packed into plastic bags, and some other various odds and ends that may have some real use someday on the boat.
 Included in the vacuum bagged "stuff" was some vinyl and zippers that I had cut out of our bow pad. The bow pad was used very little as we soon found out that underway at any speed, the pad would sail up and threaten to jump ship. In fact, the first time we took Swing Set to any speed, the pad flew up and overboard in a split second. A buddy on board who is 6'3" and about 240 pounds had all he could do to salvage the pad from the river after it had soaked up several pounds of Mississippi into the foam.
  Soon after, the pad got carted back home and remained under the bed for years. The vinyl on the pad has a seam pattern that matched the bench seat in the cockpit, so last year when we decided to re-upholster the cockpit seat, we were able to use some of the vinyl from the bow pad for a perfect match. We are saving the rest for some other repairs as they are needed. The lounge on the bridge has the same pattern and we have learned that it is no longer available.
  The zippers are the big white YKK ones that can serve as replacements for zippers on the bimini as they are needed. Most of the zippers on the bimini have already been replaced, but I'm sure the canvas will outlast some of the other zippers.
  Rosie had also packed some bedding, in the form of sheets and pillow cases, that we can use as the others wear out. We probably have more bedding that we can take on board than we will need for years, but it's inevitable that stuff like towels and bedding will need to be replaced, and we'll treat an overabundance of supplies like these as perishables. We'll continue to pack Swing Set to the gills with things that will certainly be of some use someday, but finding room has already become a challenge.

Cleaning House

  If you've read this blog from the start, you know about our history of living on the Meramec River and our experiences with floods. Because floods tend to "clean out your basement" occasionally, we never did acquire the amount of junk over the years like most people do. We've been able to keep things rather stream lined.
  When we moved off of the river in 1999, we packed up some boxes that didn't get opened when we moved into the city, and they stayed sealed shut when we moved to our current home over ten years ago. We changed that last night, or at least made a start.
  Our condo doesn't have much storage space. We have a storage closet in a community storage area on our floor, and we have a "utility closet" just off the kitchen that houses our furnace and has become the official kingdom of Holly, our puppy. We have a small refrigerator in there, a two drawer file cabinet, all of Holly's necessities, and two wire shelves full of boxes and bags that haven't been opened in ten years.
  Swing Set only has so much room. I feel like we have plans for every nook and cranny on board, but last night I found things that I need to make room for, and other things that just had to be thrown away. A lot of cruisers I've read about usually keep their homes intact, along with all of their "stuff", or they rent a storage unit, or leave things with family. Our intention is to get rid of everything except what can fit into a hope chest that Rosie has had since she owned her first bra. The hope chest will stay at her brother's house, and probably won't get opened again until we are dead.

Anticipation

  It's mid February and the weather here today in St. Louis is about as bleak as it gets. The sky is grey and soupy, and I can barely see the Mississippi from our living room window. But still, in the haze I can see an occasional towboat making their way up river, or down, out there in the narrow channel of the St. Louis Port.
  A day does not go by when I don't think about our plan on leaving the area aboard Swing Set, and our view of the Mississippi from the windows of our condo never fail to remind us as to how near the time is coming.
  Not only did we run into most of our river friends at the St. Louis Boat and Sports Show, we attended a couple of birthday parties in the last two weeks also. The question everyone had was, "So when are you guys leaving?"
  Another one was, "Are you getting excited?"