We arrived in Stuart, FL dog tired, but excited to get to work. Of course Mark had actual work on top of boat work, but we got a lot done in Stuart, by choice and also by nature of necessity.

The boat started out at Harborage Yacht Club and Marina, a quaint Marina that was in the process of renovations. As far as amenities go there was water and shore power plus they had a swimming pool, which was great for those hot summer days. Unfortunately, they do not allow liveaboards and I gave up the game by opening my huge mouth, so after about a week we were hunting for a new marina, as if we didn’t have enough on our plates.

To make matters a little more complicated our insurance wanted us to fix a few items from the survey and they wanted a licensed captain to sign off on our sailing abilities before we could move the boat on our own. Not to mention we weren’t feeling at all confident about docking our boat in the first place. To make a long story short we ended up hiring a captain to sign off on our skills and in the process he helped us move marinas. After our first day out with Captain Ken we arrived at our new slip at Sunset Bay Marina. Now let me tell you, Sunset Bay is a little more expensive and it doesn’t have a pool, but in all other aspects this was a fantastic move for us.

For one thing it’s walking distance to Downtown Stuart where there are restaurants, art galleries, coffee shops, ice cream and more. They also had bikes that we could borrow to run errands and go to the grocery store. The scenic walk to downtown Stuart that took you over a boardwalk with a lovely view of the water took about 10 minutes, but you could make the walk in about 5 minutes if you cut through town instead.

The big thing about Sunset Bay was that we went from being isolated and learning on our own, to suddenly being around a bunch of other boat people. Our slip was on a dock with a bunch of friendly and experienced boaters and sailors, but right across from us was a couple that had just bought a catamaran without any sailing experience and one slip down was a lady who had just bought a monohull on her own without any experience either. Talk about inspiring.

Being around all of the newbies was great because we could all swap stories and laugh about our dumb mistakes and minor triumphs (that felt like humungous victories). While hanging around the experienced sailors was fantastic because they could point us in the right direction whenever we got stuck on a project.

As introverts it was a little overwhelming having so many people around and offering advice, but as soon as I quit being self-conscious about not knowing anything about boating it was nice. It’s still a struggle to admit I’m clueless and ask for help, but youtube has been a fantastic place to start. Obviously when people do projects on youtube nothing ever goes wrong and they have all the right tools and they say it’s easy and it only takes them 10 minutes. When I do the same project I’m always missing pieces and the thing breaks halfway through and the project takes all day. That’s something to get used to.

It’s strange going from being good at your job and feeling confident in your abilities to being a total novice, but you’ve got to start somewhere and our insurance wanted us to start by fixing the tachometer, tightening the stuffing box on our prop shaft, dealing with the dry rot on the intake hose for the head and replacing the hose for our propane. We also discovered that our bilge pump wasn’t working, which turned out to be one of the most challenging projects for a total novice.

In between all of the boat projects we also worked on emptying our storage unit, cleaning the boat, finding storage solutions, down sizing and exploring Stuart. Needless to say, we were busy, but we were adjusting okay. It was pretty warm and we were living without air conditioning, which we were getting used to, but poor Figment and Albee were not pleased about their new living arrangements. They went from a dry, air conditioned apartment on land, to a hot, humid boat, on water. There was quite a bit of hiding in small spaces.

At first they were nervous about every little noise and frankly so were we, but they started getting used to the motion. Albee was willing to at least touch his life vest, Figment was much more skeptical.

On our second day at Sunset Bay a neighbor offered to let us use his spare air conditioner. We denied the offer at first, but the poor kitties looked miserable and we ended up sheepishly asking if the offer was still on the table. We kept the AC for a month and hadn’t realized how much we were suffering until suddenly we stopped being too hot all the time.

Figment and Albee started to get a lot more comfortable with boat life when we installed the AC in our companionway. It was a bit of a pain to step over, but it was worth it, especially since we were actively doing projects. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to keep the AC forever since A) it was a loaner and B) we needed shore power to run it, but it really helped while we were at the dock.

We are still playing catch up here on the blog, but stay tuned for how we fixed our bilge pump, other boat projects and how we’ve all been adjusting. For more up to date information and pictures check out our Instagram!