Being in year six of a five year plan, we are finally making the move to head out on our adventure. We have given notice on our jobs – as of May 13 we will be unemployed and busier than ever! Between now and then we have a ton of work to do on the house and on the boat – in time to do even more work once we quit!!! There are house jobs, yard jobs and so many boat jobs.

A couple of the jobs are well underway – the aft cabin is finally starting to go back together – soon we will be able to move the new mattress (having already cut the foam and cover to size) out of our living room and back down to the boat. Our little 12 volt freezer will be able to be moved back down to the boat, freeing up a precious 2 feet of floor space in the spare bedroom. The sails may be able to go on and hopefully we can start to fill up the below v-birth storage with the extra sails. All of that will leave us enough room to put the life raft that currently lives in our living room into the spare room. At that point, we can hopefully start to rip up the floors and get new ones installed. We also need to paint the entire inside of the house so there is that…

Meantime, the engine was pulled today!!! Yep, our boat is without a heart right now… the new engine will be arriving next week and then we will need to do the whole process in reverse! A new engine was not originally on our purchasing list and deciding to buy it was tough – it is a big chunk of money we didn’t think we would spend. Owen was worried about new strange sound it was making and compression tests suggested not all was right. Well thank heavens we ordered it a couple of months ago as we fired it up last Sunday only to have it run for a few minutes before dying – Owen tried to restart it only have a horrific metal grinding noise instead of a running engine – catastrophic failure!!!

Right now the house and the boat are a disaster and our lawn is a bit of a jungle. Hopefully we can start to make some forward progress.

Although the adventure began nearly six years ago – it truly feels like it is now on!