Blog 012 – Today We Celebrate

Today, May 17, 2016 we celebrate one month away from the dock. This is a small step for Silhouette but one giant leap for Steve & Liana.

Not long ago, each first night we were at a new anchorage I was constantly getting up – every thirty minutes – checking our position to make sure we were holding. Every movement of the boat would shake me from my slumber to scramble up the ladder, check the chart plotter, check the depth sounder, look at the coastline, check the radar. Ok, we’re not drifting, we haven’t dragged the anchor out with the tide-shift, and we didn’t just drift out to sea on a three hour tour.

But now…I am pretty sure we could sleep thru a hurricane. Fast forward one month – we drop the anchor, back down on it at 2000 rpm to set it, watch our position for a few minutes, set the snubber and that’s it. Great sleep and no worries.

Recently, we got a phone call from my brother Pete after he had checked the weather for our location. He called to see if we were ok. Liana answered the phone. I was sound asleep. I was oblivious to the conversation. She told him, yep it’s storming here and we’re just fine. We had rain- torrential rain, heavy gusting winds to 30 kts, big swells shifting us around, lightning flashing in the widows and I slept like a baby. The previous owner of Silhouette said to trust our anchor and chain. If it’s well set, he said he would trust his life to it and many times had. Trust takes time – apparently about a month.

So for a month we have tested and tried all the systems away from the dock. We have made all of our own drinking water. This is an achievement because we did not even know how to operate a water-maker when we left. The batteries were also a big concern for us. Silhouette had constant power from the dock for more than a year without any real use of her batteries. We did not know if they would even maintain a charge. And now we have made all of our own electricity for a month. Between solar and generator we have kept our batteries topped off. We used air conditioners when it was raining and needed to keep the hatches closed. Our freezer has kept everything frozen, our refrigerator kept things cool. We watched movies at night and run fans when we slept. We have washed all of our laundry with our own water and used the sun to dry them. Liana’s used the Sailrite sewing machine to make pillows, screened-in hatch covers, misc bags and straps for our hammock.

We have drove the family car (our dingy) to a dock at least a few dozen times. Every place we went we either walked or rode a bike (our other family car). Except when we took a train tour in St Augustine. We have not made more than two garbage bags of trash in the last 30 days. Our dingy is now getting low on fuel, she has gobbled up nearly four gallons of gasoline and our boat still has half a tank of diesel. So in the last month of heavy motoring on the ICW and charging batteries with the diesel generator we have used less than 100 gal of fuel or around three gallons a day.

Our life is leaving a lot less in our wake than a few months ago. Our feet are zebra-striped by the sun and our sandals. I lost weight but ate better. We spent more continuous time together than we have since we have been married. We wear less clothes and wear the same ones more often. We watch every sunrise and every sunset together. We stop to smell flowers when we walk by them. We watch jumping fish and dolphins playing, slow moving manatees and turtles eating. Today it’s safe to say the cruising life is the life for us. Yes, I would say our shake down cruise is a success. God is so Good.