change of address

This blog was always my blog. I tried to keep it focused on our plans, our progress and our happenings but it's always been my voice. My perspective. My grammar crimes. This next phase in our lives, we want a blog with both of our voices. Rather than continue the good fight here, we are going to mothball Leaving Normal and create a brand new spot for y'all to keep track of us.

We have a new domain and lofty plans for our home on the intarwebs. In the meantime, please change your bookmarks, RSS feeds, and post-it notes to our new blog address:

http://blog.svhelloworld.com

martian attack averted

We have a broad network of spies throughout the city of Seattle. Partially to stave off martian attack but mostly to capture pictures of our boat as it approaches its new home. One such spy - Alison (not her real name) - grabbed this bit of evidence whilst pretending to have lunch at a vegetarian restaurant in Fremont about 2 miles from where we'll launch her back in the water:

monday monday

Got a call from the trucker yesterday as he was passing through Baker, Oregon. He would like to know where to drop off this fine vessel Monday morning. Now, there's all sorts of events that could happen in the next 24 hours to prevent that from happening up to and including:

• flat tire


• navigational error


• banana peels on the highway


• martians

Barring any of those possibilities, the boat should be here Monday morning.

Oh, and.

I hope you all haven't gotten too comfortable here at imleavingnormal.blogspot.com. There will be a change of address soon...

good news!

After a cavalcade of fuck-ups and delays, things are finally going smooth and our boat will be here sooner than expected!

Hahaha. Nooooo. Not really.

The driver got pulled over in Arizona for blah blah blah whatever I don't care. Boat won't be here until Monday.

I'll be patiently holding my breath until then.

more delays

Apparently the knuckleheads that wrapped the mast (I wrapped the mast) did a crappy job of it and the truck driver that's down there picking it up has to re-wrap it. He's going to do his best to undo those clowns' (mine) wrap job and bundle it up with whatever he has available. He'll take off tomorrow morning.

[sigh]

You just can't find good help these days.

contents may settle during shipment

She is no longer sitting here on jackstands. As of 9AM this morning, she's on a truck negotiating the Mexican roads between San Carlos and Tucson, AZ.

I'm totally not nervous.

(check out pics from Mexico here including the tasty surprise we found sitting inside the mast when we pulled it out)

goodbye $1.20 beer!

We left San Carlos, MX at 10:00AM Friday morning. We slogged all the way back to Seattle by Saturday night at midnight. Rolled out of the car, stumbled down the dock and fell face first into bed. Woke up 10 hours later to my sister knocking on the door.

The boat is still lying in San Carlos. The driver was sick so they couldn't ship until today. An email today let us know they will absolutely be shipping her tomorrow. This is "Mexico" time so we're not holding our breath. Maybe. Hopefully. Cross your fingers.

Still don't have an ETA when she'll show up in Seattle so I'll just keep my cardiologist on speed dial until she shows up in good condition.

buenos nachos

5AM.

I've slept 30 minutes so far the previous evening and Christy is taking her turn napping on the bow of the boat on a cockpit cushion under a towel in the pouring rain. I'm down below finishing up making the sure that the boom and whisker pole sitting on the floor of the cabin below don't go "walkabout" and destroy all the great woodwork we now have.

The truck is scheduled to arrive at 6AM.

We still haven't:
- pulled the prop
- removed 90 lbs of steel anchors from the bow pulpit
- tied down bimini and dodger frames in a manner that won't trash them or the boat
- finished wrapping the boom and all its accoutrements in a metric ton of shrink wrap
- 100 other tiny little things that need to be done to ship a boat.

I grudgingly woke Christy up because our timeline went from 'Urgent' to 'Oh Shit'. We worked furiously until 6AM.

No truck.

8AM. More work. No truck.

930AM. Oh yeah, the truck driver is sick and can't drive the boat up until maybe Monday.

Awesome.

After a 3 hour nap on the boat, we are in Froggy's down several Coronas and much happier. Back to the boat later when temps go down to deal with all the packing we did a crappy job on during the all-night boat prep marathon.

Boat arrival in Seattle? Can't rightly say. If'n I was a bettin' man, I'd put money on August.

via con huevos

We're still here on the surface of the sun. The signs all say Mexico but I'm not fooled.

The boat? Ours.

The mast? Pulled.

Us? Hot. Tired. Sweaty.

Take care. More updates to follow.

hola!

Here we are in sunny (*really* sunny) San Carlos, Mexico. It's 180 degrees in the shade. We're sitting inside the gringo bar Club de Capitanes finishing up some brilliant ceviche and I don't know how many Negro Modelos.

We spent the morning helping the current owner rig the boat and get it ready for sea trial and survey. Which meant putting on some sails and running the engine up to temperature.

After that we spent the morning photographing everything above decks. Every thing. E-v-e-r-y. Thing. If we ever offer to show pictures of our time in San Carlos: run away. The slideshow will consist 1700 photos of turnbuckles and blocks. Party!

Tomorrow, we meet the surveyor and then head over to Marina Real where the boat is at now. We'll do the sea trial on our way to moving the boat over to Marina San Carlos where we'll haul out and finish the survey. From there, if all things go well, we'll haul the boat over to dry storage and start the Herculean task of prepping the boat for a week of 60 mph winds and Mexican roads and ill-tempered crane operators and blowing dirt and monsoons and kamikaze insects and ninjas. I'm not sure about that last one but the boy scouts said I should always be prepared so we're not taking any chances.

As always, we'll keep you updated.

fourth of july

So there I was, innocently standing on the deck of our houseboat talking to someone during our houseboat Fourth of July party. The next thing I know:



And who is smiling down at me from the dock?



So after crawling out and a furious chase up and down the dock and around the house a few times, I finally caught her.

"Your pants are going into the lake. If you'd like to be in them when they do, you should maybe stand up."



A brief struggle...



..and justice was served.



me: "It's ok. I'll just buy a new iPhone. I didn't need that one anyways."

Christy: "Oh SHIT! I'm so sorry!!!"

me: HARHARHAR



OK, it was a petty victory but it made me feel a little better anyways. We were the only two to brave the water on the fourth since the temperatures were typical Seattle three-day weekend temps. That is to say, not warm.

The rest of the day was spent drinking beer, eating BBQ, and paddling back and forth to the group of friends anchored out in Lake Union on a raftup of sailboats. We watched the fireworks on lawn furniture we hauled up onto the roof.


Jim, Christy and I.


One of the many trips back and forth on the kayak.


Skipper Mike!


Seattle skyline from the roof of the houseboat.


Fisher and I hauling dinghies back to the houseboat from the sailboat raft up out in the lake.


BANG.


KAPOW.


KERBLOOWEE.


Skipper Kim!


Christy schooling Kim on leg wrasslin'


Me channeling Lincoln Hawk. "The world meets nobody halfway. When you want something, you gotta take it."

Wicked fun party. We're really going to miss houseboat life when we leave. Summers here are so much fun. So. Much. Fun.

Ben, owner of a beautiful Westsail 28, was one of the folks rafted up on Lake Union. He took some great shots of the party out on the lake here.

how could this possibly go wrong?

Yep, we decided to truck our shiny, new (to us), beautiful (we think, haven't seen it yet) boat from San Carlos, Mexico to Seattle. To say that we're nervous about this is a galactic understatement. The logistics go a little like so:

• 7/6 Fisher drives our car from Seattle down to New Orleans to drop off his dog with his mom. Stay with me, it'll come around to our boat.


• 7/13 Fisher drives to Phoenix and hops on a flight, leaving the car somewhere near the Phoenix airport.


• 7/18 We fly down to Phoenix and pick up the car and drive to Tucson.


• 7/19 We pick up a bunch of packing/padding supplies in Tucson.


• 7/19 We cross the border and head to San Carlos.


• 7/20 We help the seller un-mothball the boat and get it ready for the survey.


• 7/21 We pick up the surveyor in the morning at Marina Real. We perform the sea trials whilst transporting the boat to the south to Marina San Carlos where we have a tide dictated haul out time of 1300. We have the boat hauled and continue the survey on the hard. Assuming everything goes ok, we hand the owner an oil drum full of cash and take ownership.


• 7/21 Once the boat is ours, Marina San Carlos can un-step the mast and transport the boat a mile down the road to their dry storage.


• 7/22 Everything above decks needs to photographed, labeled, removed and stowed below to prepare the boat for shipping. Shipping a boat means several days of 60MPH winds - just shy of hurricane forces - and constant vibration. This means we need to be really careful how we pack the boat and equipment to make sure it doesn't scar up the woodwork and break stuff.


• 7/23 See 7/22.


• 7/24 The Mexican truck comes by and picks up the boat to haul it to a storage yard in Tucson, AZ. We take off to drive back to Seattle.


• 7/27 We arrive back in Seattle.


• 7/28 The US truck picks up the boat at the storage yard and begins the long slog up to Seattle.


• 7/30 Christy flies out to Connecticut for Clemfest. It's a long story but somewhere along the way, they bury a pig.


• 7/31 Or thereabouts. Our shiny new beautiful boat arrives in Seattle at a boat yard along the Ship Canal and is set up in their yard on jackstands.


• 8/1 I fly out to Connecticut to eat some pig.


• 8/3 We fly back to Seattle


• 8/4 For the next week or two, we re-assemble the boat and tackle any maintenance items that will be much easier while the boat is out of the water and the mast is lying on sawhorses in the yard.


• 8/15 Or thereabouts. We'll motor through the locks down to Shilshole and nestle into our comfy slip. (That we don't have yet.)

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

caliber 40

She's a 1993 Caliber 40. She's bristling with cruising gear as her previous owners who spent their winters in Mexico aboard her are getting out of cruising. So this really is a "package deal". Life raft. Tender. Outboard. Full suite of ground tackle and sails. Electronics, albeit a bit dusty and old. Watermaker. Solar panels. The list goes on. And on.

She's currently lying in San Carlos, MX. Before you ask: no. We don't know how we're going to get her up to Seattle - probably by truck. And before you say: "aren't those big white flappy things meant to propel the boat in the water by harnessing energy in wind and thereby moving the boat to distant places harharhar?", know this. Sailing a boat north up the Pacific coast is several week long bash into the wind. The prevailing winds come out of the northwest, just about exactly where you want to go. So we're still buying tons of diesel to motor the boat up, PLUS fixing all the things that break when you bash a boat into the wind for weeks at a time. So, do we trust people to dangle our shiny brand new boat from a crane transferring it from the Sea of Cortez to a Mexican truck to another crane to a US truck to another crane and then splash it in the Puget Sound?

[sigh]

We don't really know for sure. There's a few logistic hurdles we need to get around before she's nestled into a comfy slip out at Shilshole (including getting a slip at Shilshole).

I posted the pics we got from the owners so once you click here, you'll know as much about this boat as we do!











Manufacturer's website is here although we don't have the LRC version. Which means we don't have the several hundred gallons of fuel advertised.

offer accepted

whiskey tango foxtrot?

Yeah, I know. I totally went AWOL on ya'all. Ton's of stuff going in our world, the most important of which is.... we made an offer on a boat. That we've completely fallen in love with. And really want. It's beautiful. Well equipped. Rugged. Exactly what we want*.

We'll keep you posted.

(*andohbythewaysittinginmexico)