Our first month of winter live-aboard

Our stationary life is not one exciting enough to bother writing about much. I’m not going to pretend that we did anything exciting or adventurous during the month of December. Quite the opposite actually, Work fills most our day and some light inter-boat socializing during the evenings in which the wind isn’t blowing at 40+ knots – which isn’t often.

If there is one subject that is the headliner, it is the wind. At this time of the year the wind is blowing hard from the South. A few weeks ago I dreaded 30 knots winds, but now it feels mundane and calm compared to what is thrown at us nearly each night. 40-45 knot winds are becoming familiar, and stick around for large portions of the day if not multiple days. This little marina is not protected from southerly winds at all, so a beating we take, almost daily. I am finding that the wind is less comfortable when tied to a dock as the boat is prevented from performing it’s natural roll. The lines stop the roll hard and spring us back the other direction – jolty like. Kerri and I both just randomly fall over while trying to walk the 12 feet to the head, or bed, or galley.

One day each week (two if we are lucky) it grows calm and serene, and that is the time we try to get outside for a little exercise. There are a few state parks nearby. Old forts, but they come with a ton of trail through forest, and those come with the possibility of finding mushrooms… not that I care, but she does. It turns out not to be the most exercise as our travel speed while mushroom-hunt-hiking is roughly 1 mile per hour. More squats than normal I guess. Still good to get outside into a forest for a spell and Kerri does make all sorts of “interesting” things with the foraged fungus.

You have to move slow and quiet when hunting mushrooms

The big wood-project of the month was our new dinette table. We had finally sourced a new table pedestal (from overseas, of course) and found an amazing piece of locally grown and felled wood in a shop only a block away from the marina. Two weeks of chopping, sanding, staining, and spraying and our new table – a project that started in 2019 when we installed the wood stove – is finally done. The pedestal allows us to raise, lower, spin the table as well as slide it left, right, fore, and aft within the saloon area which allows us so many uses. We got straight to using it to it’s fullest with a fire warmed movie night in coffee-table-mode!