The Clewie Clips

Now that we are living aboard our newest crew member would like to get involved in the reporting. She is a tender 10 months old but has had a wealth of experience traveling. Her reports will be known as The Clewie Clips.

Heeerr's Clewie:

Howdy everyone from Texas. I had to learn that howdy lingo. I am originally from Georgia. A southern peach indeed. Here is a picture of me when I was just a baby.


I have already flown in an airplane, traveled by car from Texas to Ohio and back and spent many weekends on the boat.

I was getting really worried when all the furniture started disappearing from my house. The humans weren't going to work either. I thought for sure we were going to be living under a bridge somewhere, what fun that would be. All kinds of critters to chase there. Here's another picture of me laying on my favorite perch. I am a little older in this picture.
Heck, I'm a lot older, not even recognizable from my baby picture.

Well, I just wanted to introduce myself. It is going to be really interesting to see if my humans can really pull off this cruising thing.

Officially Live Aboards

We are now officially boat live aboards. We moved our remaining items that we wanted on the boat to the boat today. Our house closing is tomorrow, Friday, at 2:00. We have scheduled to have the boat hauled out of the water on December 2nd. Since it is later in the year than we had originally planned to move the boat we are now thinking that we will move the boat to Bradenton Florida. It is a little further south, just south of Tampa Bay, and will be warmer. Also, the Gulf of Mexico can be a rough place to be this time of year and this will eliminate the crossing of the corner of Florida between Pensacola and Clear Water. From Bradenton we can take out time getting to Marathon in the Florida Keys. We will be able to use the Intracoastal Waterway part of the way to Marathon if we choose.

Let the packing begin!

We have a contract on our house. We have to be out by the 20th of November. Talk about stress. We need to separate what goes into storage and what is going on the boat, mainly clothing. We also have to set up our mail forwarding, change address and take care of a bunch of other administrative items.

The boat is still on the Lake and we still have a few items left to do before moving it. We need to keep it on the lake so we will have some place to go after we close on the house. I also found out today the lake level is up again from all the rain we have had. The dock where the boats are hauled out of the water is almost under water. If the lake goes up another foot it will be under water which means no boats can get pulled. As it is now we can't even think about moving the boat until December. Hey, we're retired and everyday is a Saturday so it doesn't really matter.

YIPPEE Retirement!!!!!

We made it, finally. Both Sandy and I turned in our computer equipment to our respective companies on Wednesday September 30th. A day that will be remembered by us for a long long time. What this means is that our cruising plans will start moving forward in earnest.

Last week I installed the SSB radio equipment. I still have the antenna and the counterpoise to finish up. I will post photos when completed. I also received our life raft. I purchased a Winslow 6 person standard offshore raft.

I have finished getting the permits for our radio equipment from the FCC, received our 2010 U.S. Customs sticker and have applied to the Bahamas Department of Agriculture for permits to get our cats into the Bahamas this winter.

We have left to bottom paint Xpereince and move her to the coast. We are planning to move to Mobile Alabama sometime after November 15th. We would like to spend December in the Florida Keys and then head over to the Bahamas until April before heading up the U.S. east coast to the Chesapeake Bay where we will spend summer of 2010.

Solar Panel Install

I have added three Kyocera 85 watt solar panels on a mini arch over the bimini. The mini arch also has four antenna mounts. I put the GPS, XM Satellite, Wi-Fi and Cellular antennas there. The solar panels are connected to a Bluesky 2000E MPPT charge controller. This controller boosts the input charge up to 30%. Each of the panels has a rating of 5.02 amps. On a sunny day I was able to get a total of about 90-95 amps. This is plenty to maintain the batteries for normal use at anchor where our largest draw is from the refrigeration. While sailing and using the chartplotter, auto-pilot, radio, and other electronics we should be able to go for a couple of days without additional supplementary charging.

Click on an image to enlarge.

New fabric on interior cushions

We were never really crazy about the interior fabric on the cushions. We took the plunge and redid them ourselves. Sandy and I tore them apart and used the pieces for the pattern. We reused the bottoms which is a gray sunbrella and the zippers. Sandy then cut the new fabric and I did the sewing machine work. It took about 10 yards of fabric and 60 hours of labor. Cost was about $200. A lot better than the $4500 that a shop would have charged.

New equipment

I have added a Garmin network. It includes the 5212 chartplotter, XM weather and a fishfinder sounder. The sounder transducer also has speed and temperature. I will add the GMR18 HD radar next year. A Kato radar mount is mounted on the mast. I have also added Kato davits and engine lift. The engine will mount on an Edson motor mount.

New Dinghy

S/V Xperience has a new dinghy. It is an AB 9VL rigid inflatable boat (RIB). This is the light version which is only 106 pounds and 9'6" long. I added a Mercury 9.9 HP 4 stroke engine with a power thruster attachment. The engine weighs in at about 90 pounds. It will easily fit on my davits. It gets up on plane quick with two persons aboard. I haven't checked the speed with a GPS just yet but it should be able to hit about 22 MPH. That's flying in such a small boat.

Click image to see a larger photo.

Exterior wood refinishing

After 6 and a half years our exterior wood needed to be completely stripped to bare wood and refinished. We had regular Cetol and Cetol gloss covering the wood. We decided to switch to a new Cetol product, Cetol Natural Teak. It is much lighter in color and has a UV inhibitor to protect the wook. It looks great, just like wet natural bare teak. The job was painful in that we had to get into all kinds of strange positions to reach every inch of wood. Sure glad it is done though.

Pirate Night on the boat

We had dress and talk like a pirate night on the boat while anchored in Sandy Cove, Arrrrg ye scoundrel!