Six Years On The Boat (Posted 1/5/2012)

On December 27th we celebrated 6 years of living on the boat!  Hard to believe that 6 years could have flown by so fast. I guess that the old saying, "Time flies when you're having fun!" is true. We have sailed a total of about 5000 miles and anchored in well over 100 different anchorages.

When we tell people we live on a sailboat we get some predictable responses. Listed in order of most frequent the responses are:

"Really?  That must be great!" (This is by far the most frequent response, usually followed by many questions about living on a boat)

"I would love to do that but my wife won't do it!" (This is always accompanied by a frowning sad face on the man saying it.)

"Really? Don't tell my husband because that's what he wants to do!"

"God, I envy you!" (to which I always reply, "Even I envy me!", with a big grin on my face!)

"How big is your sailboat?" Our reply is "27 feet" to which they say "Wow, you must really like each other and get along well!" to which we reply, "If you don't get along, a 100 foot boat would not be big enough!" We assume that for some reason most people don't want to be this close to their loved one and think they couldn't live in such close quarters. Can't understand that but different strokes for different folks. :-)

"Oh, I could never live on a boat." (This is almost always from a woman, see the frowning sad face of the man above.)

There is no question that living on a small sailboat is not for everyone (or even most people).  But for us it has been perfect. We still love it as much as we did when we first started out. No, we love it more now than when we started out.  It was my dream all my life. Linda didn't even know that people did it but she might even love it more than I do if that is possible!  For every one of us out here cruising and "living the dream" there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of "want-a-bees" dreaming of doing it. They are reading the books and magazines as I did, wanting to go, thinking of a million reasons why they can't, tied to the dock, thinking they just need to save some more money and then go, dreaming of "Someday Isle".

There was a recent discussion on an internet forum for cruisers asking the question "Why do you like living on a boat?"  There were many answers and a lot of concensus. Many said "Don't even try to explain it to dirt dwellers, they won't be able to understand."  I asked Linda for her reasons, we discussed it and our reasons were the same as most of the common answers.

*Freedom to go where we want, move anytime we want, see new things and new places, and take our home and everything with us

*Being independant and self-sufficient (we live "off the grid", make our own electricity, etc.)

*The view out the window changes everyday unlike a house, condo or apartment, so we are not bored

*Living close to nature and not couped up in a house, condo or apartment

*Meeting new people all the time who have the same interests as we do and don't care what you "were" when you were working. From millionaires to "boat bums" we are all the same and enjoying life and the same things.

*Being rocked to sleep by gentle waves, gorgeous sunsets, palm trees, oh what the heck, you know...living in Paradise! :-)

So after six years we are loving life, living the dream and enjoying the ride! We plan to continue this lifestyle as along as health allows and for now we are healthy and don't want to contemplate the day we might have to stop and move ashore for health reasons or old age.  Hopefully, that is many, many years away. 

On December 29th, Amy, Mark, Olivia and Laura arrived for a visit.  They stayed in a nice condo on the beach in Fort Myers Beach.  We, of course, were in heaven and had a great visit with them.  The girls LOVE the beach so there was sand castle making and shell collecting. The condo had a heated pool and the weather was so warm and nice that even Linda and I went swimming with the girls and loved it! That's right....on January 1st the two "winter wimps" went swimming after years of making fun of all the northern tourists swimming in heated pools in Florida! We visited the Ford and Edison winter estates and museums, saw and learned about manatees at Manatee Park where they come in the winter to enjoy the warm water outflow from a power plant, ate way too much at restaurants, and launched the rocket we got for Mark for Christmas (which we all enjoyed!). All to soon it was time for them to go back to Orlando to Amy's grandmother's place and fly out the next day back to the frozen north.

Here are some photos from their visit:

The weather was gorgeous while they were here as it had been all winter but after they left we had our first real cold front of the winter.  The temperature one morning got down to 34 degrees!!!  Fortunately, we had added a propane heater this year since we knew it would be colder here than in the Keys and it did it's job well so we were OK. That one day was the worst and it is now warming back up nicely.