Departure date is set

We have finally set our departure date - Wednesday, September 5th. Originally we wanted the 28th of August, however, CDS building movers (who moved our boat last year and who we were very impressed with) couldn't do it at that time because they are in the middle of moving March House. So now we have them moving our boat just after Labour Day.

We are settling into life on the boat, having showers at the club house every morning and making phone calls and checking e-mails from there as well. The recent thunder storms at night on the boat have been rather noisy affairs while lighting up the whole cabin and shaking the boat. We are still sorting through stuff at Geoff's mom's place as well as working on the boat (floors, water tank, inverter, engine, mast steps, etc....). Things are slowing coming together.

Moving on board

Here is the view of our cabin on Saturday the day after we moved in. More pictures of the daily progress can be found on flikr.

Here comes Murphy again

Wednesday we had Neil over to help bleed the engine (i.e., get the air out of the fuel lines). This should have taken about an hour, however, by the time we were ready to start the engine we found that we had no cooling water. We have always had a problem with our cooling water, but we normally just reved up the engine a bit and the water would come. This time nothing. Upon investigation, we found that the through-hull for the cooling water for the engine was broken in the closed position - so you can move the handle, but it doesn't do anything to the valve inside. So, in the next few days Geoff will be going for a swim to insert a wooden plug into the through-hull to block it off so we can change the ball valve without taking the boat out of the water. This is the type of repair we have only read about, but we've never heard of anyone actually doing it!

We are live-aboards

Well, after three rather stressful days we are now truly live-aboards on our boat. Here is the update on the last few days...

On Wednesday, two car and trailer loads were taken out of the house - one to the boat (which ended up being just a huge pile inside), and the other to Geoff's mom's for storage or later sorting. A huge thank you to Gary for his help in this (and for taking all of our garbage on Friday).

Thursday was an early start as Geoff was down at the boat at 7:30am to get some more work done on the freezer. It seems to be working a bit better now, but it's not perfect yet.

Friday, moving day... a crazy, crazy stressful day.
At around 11am, as we were trying to pack up the remaining piles in the house, we got a call from the lawyer saying that the new buyer had just notified him that we had to get rid of all the cans of wall paint for touch-ups that we left in the basement as a courtesy as he didn't want them - so we had yet another pile of stuff to deal with.

Around noon we realized that we were not going to be able to get things out in time for the 6pm deadline, so a frantic call went out to Justin, who came through and was put to work (more than he expected I'm sure). Thanks, Justin, for helping us! You really went well beyond neighbourly kindness - thank you so much. So after three more car and trailer loads the house was empty at 5:30pm as the new owner showed up to start ripping out the kitchen...

We unloaded some of the items from the car and spent the evening trying to relax with dinner and a drink at the yacht club. Our first night on the boat was great... sooo quiet, even though we didn't sleep much due to the adrenalin still pumping through our bodies.

P.S.: Some photos of the piles of boxes in the boat should be posted in the next few days.