The sailing adventures of SV Meriwether and her crew
In our land based travels we did all that we could to stay away from established RV parks and their crowded and over priced lifestyle. Marinas are the equivalent in the boating world, so obviously we hope to spend most of our time outside of them. What is known as “boondocking” on land is referred to as “gunkholing” on the...
Following our third ever sail of Meriwether, and nailing the docking that day, our confidence the following weekend was high enough to attempt a late afternoon sail with an evening anchoring to watch the sun set while on the water. With the boat packed up and our checklist complete, we pulled out of our slip and started motoring out of...
It has been six weeks since arriving in Bellingham. Six weeks is an extremely long time for us to be stationary – matching the longest time in our four years together; six weeks during the van rebuild back in late 2017. During these weeks neither of us have taken any time off – just hammering through as much work as...
Following last week’s rough docking we really needed a confidence booster, so we took Meriwether out once again – getting back on the horse and all. I had rebuilt the winch that was not working properly during our last sail and were both anxious to try it out as well. Our route was basically the same triangle path with a...
The legend goes that if you change the name of your boat, you risk angering the sea and wind gods, and your boat will take on bad luck if you don’t appease them. There’s a big long name-changing ceremony meant to purge those salty records from the depths that has about as many versions as there are boaters, but all...
Kerri and I were able to get back out on the water this past weekend, for only our second time on our own boat. I had an eighteen nautical mile sail planned for the day which would take us to an anchorage just to our South and to Lummi Island where we wanted to take a peak at another anchorage....
We hadn’t sailed since the last day of our sailing lessons back in January. We desperately wanted to get out on the water, partly to remember (hopefully) some of the things we learned and partly to give the boat a shakedown run. I wasn’t even 100% confident I had the sails rigged properly after re-installing them the past week, so...
It has been all about the todo list as of late. Just crushing out as many items as we can before our mid-May departure date… did I mention I had a departure date? For every item checked off the list, two more appear. Most are simple enough, but there are a few big tasks; like adding a full solar setup,...
We have been away from our boat for nearly four months, mainly to escape the brutal winter weather this far North. We certainly didn’t need to ride out freezing temperatures while living on the water for our first time ever, so we drove the van to the South West for those few months. It was nice to be nomadic again,...
Yes, I’ve been very quiet in the past few weeks. I’m not much the kind of guy to give a play-by-play of each individual repair or upgrade I do, either on the van or the boat, so I have spared you all that tedium. Needless to say, I was working on final repairs on the boat with a December 10th...
