How do you afford to travel on a sailboat? What do you do for work? What is your budget? Did you have debt? How did you untether yourself from an office? In this episode, we share how we built 3 separate remote income streams which allowed us us to jump on a boat and go cruising.
In this episode we continue south on a beautiful downwind day sail from Venice Beach to Boca Grande Pass, then spend a few days anchored at Cayo Costa State Park. We noticed a couple of younger cruisers drop their anchor next to us, so we dropped by to say hello.
While cruising down the west coast of Florida, we run into a few obstacles: Our power runs out without all of our solar panels up; a navigation mistake results in us finding the bottom(!); and working while traveling is just plain complicated. But hey, it’s all good fun!
Imagine what one week of cruising looks like, and you’ll never get two identical weeks. BUT— if we had to pick one, these 7 days are pretty typical of our cruising life.
After months spent mostly at docks, we venture out to live on the hook (which happens to be less than a block away from a grocery store, but hey, baby steps). This one has a little bit of everything.
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).
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.
This one is bittersweet. On one hand, the battery upgrade is a smashing success. Kirk completes the installation of our new battery bank, and we now we have all the juice we need. On the other, our arch project is a complete and utter disaster.
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.
