25 Miles and ? To Go

As of 9:30 am Thursday, January 12, 2012 we are the official owners of  “Next To Me” (AKA Golden Dolphin) a 1986 42’ Jefferson Motor Yacht!  (See previous story about two weeks ago behind the new name, in case you missed that one).

Here’s Bob sitting with the former owner.  Peter came to the boat this morning, the first time we met him during this process, to go over some notes he’d made to improve our learning curve on the idiosyncrasies of the boat, and to give us a nice bottle of Champagne to celebrate the occasion. It’s very nice to have such a positive experience with the Seller.

And here are the happy new owners!  The boat’s been moored at a yacht club in Stuart, Florida and the Club rules prevent us from keeping the boat there as we’re not members, so we moved the boat 25 miles north, up the Atlantic Intercostal Waterway (AICW) to Ft. Pierce, Florida. Does anyone know why there are so many “Forts” in Florida? Fort Pierce is on the east coast of that state, about halfway up from the Keys to Georgia.

If you double click on the chart you’ll be able to see Stuart at the bottom of the page, and Fort Pierce at the top.  The dotted line generally represents the channel that we followed up the AICW.

Given that we have little previous experience in a boat this size, we hired Captain Chris Caldwell, of Capt. Chris’s Yacht Services to help us move the boat.  It turned into an intensive 4-hour training session.  Very helpful, if a little overwhelming, as new lessons and experiences came at us like the proverbial water out of  a fire hose. But we each successfully piloted the boat for about 2 hours of travel time.

While the AICW is several miles wide, the dredged channel is only about a hundred yards wide where the water is 5 –15 feet deep, and the water outside the channel is somewhere between zero and 5 feet deep!  Quite different from our home waters where depth is usually measured in the hundreds of feet.

Our new temporary home, Harbour Isle Marina, is in the center of the above chart with the arrow pointing to the approximate location of our slip.  We’ve rented a slip here for a month, during which time we’ll have some modifications made to the boat to reflect the recommendations of the earlier survey, and to meet our preferences.  We’ll also take 3 days of training on the boat with Capt. Chris and his wife Capt. Alyse, to improve our skills.

Last night about 10 other boat residents in the marina invited us to join them for cocktails to celebrate our new boat. They were all nice folks, and we enjoyed meeting them and were made to feel very welcome. We are one of the smaller boats in the marina, and many of these folks are full-time, year-round cruisers.

Today, Friday, we spent the day moving the contents of the truck onto the boat – clothes, tools, kitchen provisions and lots of boating equipment.  It was mostly pretty chaotic, but we got a lot done. Sarah, the very nice marina manager, came by to check on us, and Darrell the marine electronics guy came to evaluate what we have (old and not very useful) and make recommendations for upgrades. Tomorrow and Sunday we will keep working to get settled, but have also set some time aside both days to play.  More on that later.

In the mean time we are now “Cruisers” if not yet “Loopers”.