After spending the equivalent of two months of our budget and then some in January, February's expenses were quite bit more tame. In fact since we had already purchased just about everything we needed to complete our projects we came in just under budget.
It’s finally starting to feel like we’re cruising! In this episode, we prep for our longest sail yet: 190 miles from St. Joseph Point to Clearwater. We give you a peak inside our ditch kit, install a MOB (man overboard) device in each of our lifejackets, and test our PLB (personal locating beacon).
This month's expenses were dominated by some major Upgrades we made to Soulianis. (You can see a detailed list of most of those on our Sailboat Upgrades page.) We returned to the boat from visiting our family and set straight to work - spending money :).
We wrapped up our River Trip at the beginning of the month and then re-stepped the mast and started prep for our big electrical project. We also flew home to visit family for the holidays and took a short ski trip over the holidays with some friends.
We set off on our first sail in the Gulf of Mexico! After a day trip to Pensacola through the GICW (Gulf Intracoastal Waterway) with Kirk’s pops, we visit Destin via car to inquire about Destin pass.
Raise the sails!! Woot woot, we’re going SAILING!! After installing two of our six solar panels, we fire up the engine to make sure Mr. Beke still runs, and we’re off the dock.
We planned to complete TWO big projects while in Mobile, AL: 1) upgrading our battery bank & 2) fabricating a solar arch with dinghy davits. After much deliberation, we decided to DIY the batteries and hire out the arch fabrication.
Our boat wasn’t ready for full-time cruising when we bought her. This was perfectly fine; we’d rather add necessary items ourselves and learn them inside and out through the process, than pay for systems already in place that may not be exactly what we want, or are old and need to replacing anyway.
Sailmaking isn’t exactly voodoo magic, but because it’s pretty tough to find much information on sailmaking & sail cloth, we wanted to share everything we’ve learned in our quest to make the right decisions about our new headsail.
Many of you may be wondering "Where is your mast?!" I know this, because we've received a ton of emails, comments, and Facebook messages with that exact question ;)
