Years before we counted many liveaboards as friends, I was very reluctant to buy a boat large enough to live aboard. Thus we chose the 25 foot Northern Crow, which was obviously too small for two people to live on. This was my insurance against being begged, nagged or pushed into moving aboard before I was ready.

We have lived aboard for several-month periods before, but never on our own boat. The longest period was seven months, with Brian on Cayenne, and shorter times on Vger, Complexity, and Indigo. We even lived on Flutterby briefly while we did insurance company-required repairs and transported it from South Carolina to North Carolina. But we always had our “home” elsewhere, or if not an entire “home,” we had something like 75% of our stuff in storage.

This time, it is different. We don’t have anything but a few boxes of photographs, wedding china, and other irreplaceable memories–we have all the things we need right here with us, either on the boat or packed up inside the Squid Wagon. And this time, moving aboard took us by surprise–we thought we knew what living aboard is all about, but life always smacks you in the face with a lesson pretty quick.

Before we arrived in the boatyard, I had been thinking of all the projects we had to do to make Flutterby ready to cruise, starting with re-finishing the bottom and fixing leaking hardware in the deck, along with any damage it had done. It has now been four full days and the only project we have completed is plumbing the icebox drain so it gets pumped overboard instead of draining into the bilge.

What have we been doing? Trying to carry our stuff up the ladder from Squidley into the boat, and find a place for it inside.

It didn’t take us three days to succumb. In fact, we would have done it in two and a half, if our cellphone had better signal in the boatyard. We are now the proud renters of a storage unit. I hope that when we are ready to sail we can fit everything aboard, but for now, this is the cheapest way to protect our sanity that I can think of.