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.
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.
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 ;)
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 ;)
This is the first full month on the river, and our first full month away from our home port. After putting last month's craziness behind us, we were delighted to see that we were much much closer to our long-term monthly cruising budget goal of $3,000 a month.
This was a bit of a crazy month. We completed the last of our must-have upgrades before heading for the river, we left our homeport, we had a big going away party/celebrated Lauren's birthday, and we had some big boat expenses - some of them unexpected.
Once we returned from our shakedown sail we had a long list of projects wanted to complete on the boat. We knew we wouldn't get to all of them before leaving but that was ok, we prioritized and slowly checked off those that were absolutely necessary.
After spending the first month getting to know the boat, and taking a few day sails, we were ready to start picking up a few key items and a few small improvements needed for spending a few weeks away from our homeport on our shakedown sail where we sailed across Lake Michigan.
We closed on our boat on July 1st in Racine, Wisconsin. July is the first full month in our Monthly Cruising Budget series and is also the first full month of boat ownership.
