This past Saturday Rebecca and I travelled to Toronto where Anthony Motley and his wife Jackie gave us a very thorough tour of their PDQ 32 Katana. The boat was still on the hard, sans mast, and had just received a new coat of antifouling paint. Our initial impression? Even for a relatively small cat this boat is plenty big! In fact, once onboard we couldn't believe all of the storage space. Anthony took time to show us the entire…
Continuing along with the "changes in lifestyle" theme let's talk about showers. Like most people I think being around dirty, smelly people for any extended period of time is not all that enjoyable, and thus we bathe and hope others do too. If you are the type of person who enjoys relaxing in a steamy shower with the water beating down on your back, that just isn't going to happen on a boat. Due to the necessity of conserving that…
Although still landlocked we are trying to at least think about some the changes in lifestyle that will be needed for us to be live-aboard cruisers. One thing that we know will be different is the management of resources such as water and fuel, including that used for cooking. Many cruisers seem to be big on the usage of pressure cookers for preparing meals. We don't have any experience with this but it appears as if they allow you to…
Yesterday, following one of our noon-hour classes (yes, we still work for a living) one of our newer students innocently asked what we planned to do for the next few hours. Because we didn't have any classes scheduled for approximately 4 hours it is easy enough for people who only see us a few hours per week to think that we would have a nice long break. Sadly, and all too typically, the next hours were spent cleaning, fixing and…
Back in November of 2008 I wrote about how I thought that a year would go by very quickly. Well now that scary little countdown timer in the right hand side bar shows a scant 6 months and 2 days until our planned departure. Ouch! Let's do a follow-up to that post from 6 months ago. I previously wrote... We have begun to curb our spending, cutting out unnecessary luxuries. An example of this is satellite TV. It is now…
The whole Pirate subject definitely needs it's place on our FAQ page! Just about everyone wants to talk about the dangers of pirates. Not to make light of the situations of those who have been the victims of this type of violence but you can't even compare the likelihood of an attack by pirates to the dangers of living, working, driving, etc. in any urban environment! Noonsite.com appears to have a pretty up-to-date reporting of pirate-related attacks against cruisers. The…