I just finished up a MASSIVE amount of new cosmetic work on Lillie Mae and am now getting serious about trying to sell her.

I refinished the entire cabin sole.. from bare wood.... and it looks really great. I also did a ton of varnishing and teak repairs, lots of painting and cleaning/detailing. She now looks FANTASTIC.

Check out the new gallery of pictures showing how good she looks and a complete listing of all her gear and equipment here:

www.svlilliemae.com


She is still lying in Jekyll Island but I will probably be moving her to south Florida sometime within the next month.

If anyone knows of anyone looking for a REALLY great boat, please let me know!


Terry

Why post a blog after a cruise is done? Good question. Why not? I figure that nobody is likely to be checking it now anyhow, so why not keep the log of the Lillie Mae going. A sounding board for myself.

It is now over 3 months since we got back from the Bahamas, a longer period of time than we were actually out cruising (away from the dock...). Looking back, things were an incredible whirlwind when we first arrived, and they have not slowed down.

After returning to the boat from 3+ weeks away on a roving tour of relatives and holidays, we were all exhausted. What we had hoped would include a week or more of very quiet, slow and relaxed rest time did not pan out. Michele was literally falling apart. Her fibromyalgia and chronic fatique syndrom reached new peaks of intensity and she was rendered into a pain wracked gelatin gooped in her berth. We were trying to get away from Jekyll and on our way north to the Elizabeth Islands so I was very busy with boat prep and the stress really got to her.

Her situation was bad enough that we set our plans aside and decided to head back to Atlanta so Michele could visit her doctors and seek new help and tests to try and figure out what was going on. We were both afraid, she had all the symptoms for MS among other things.

Off to the doctors and hospitals we went. She began seeing her chiropractor several times a week along with a massage therapist. She also starting taking between 10 and 500 of every vitamin and supplement ever invented, several times a day. At least it seemed like it. We met several times with a neurologist as well as her regular doctor. We had 2 MRIs done, a spinal tap and every blood test known to man in an effort to seek and identify ANY possible disease or syndrome. This included several visits to the emergency room including for an EXTREMELY painful blood patch procedure where she had the spinal tap done to try and alleviate monumental migraine headaches that went on constantly for over 10 days. I figured that with the supposed salvation of the massive Health Care Bill signed into law while we were off sailing, the bills would be reasonable. Oooooops. Lets just say I could purchase a LARGE new dinghy complete with engine for what all this medical care costs. (our health insurance is a catastrophic policy.... Giant deductible, all we can afford). The funny thing is, because we knew we would be paying out of pocket for all the care we sought, we were very diligent about asking care providers what things would cost. Nobody knew. Ever. Not one doctor could tell us what their services cost. The hospital could not tell us. None of the bills we received were remotely close to what we had ever been told. It's crazy. I figure any business where the service providers have no idea how much their services cost is BROKEN. Glad to know the Govt. is on top of all that.

All the tests came back negative. She does not have MS (thank God!). She does not have anything that the tests can specifically identify. This means...... Fibro hell. Fibromyalgia, interstitial cystitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome..... some others too I am pretty sure. The Cure? That's up to us to figure out.

When we first returned to the boat, I had begun a big project - Refinishing all the interior cabin sole, repainting in both the heads and doing tons of varnishing work. While Michele was staying with her parents and recuperating/seeing doctors, I came back to the boat several time to focus on getting all this work done. I am on the boat now doing the same. One thing for sure... this is going to be an amazingly good boat for someone. The interior is really looking fantastic.

When I returned home after the last trip to the boat, Michele was feeling somewhat better (meaning she was not totally bedridden) and I learned that she had decided that we were definitely done with cruising. We had not really discussed plans or options too much. I had started efforts to sell the boat, but I also had figured we would stay aboard and cruise slowly while we were trying to sell, planning to come ashore when the sale was complete. Yes... I hoped that selling the boat might just take a LOOOOONG time. That's off the table.

As I was digesting this, we got all our stuff out of storage and moved into Michele's parents rental townhouse which happened to become available.... Just in the nick of time, or as a horrible coincidence depending on your point of view. J

So before I knew what was happening, we were suddenly full tilt back into life in Suburbia America. Walmart... Publix...Massive Traffic...Cable TV...Money flowing like beer at a fraternity party... and a nagging question in my head about how on earth I was going to earn a living.

I was in the Mortgage Industry for over 17 years. But as I have learned over the past month, the industry I left is gone. It has been replaced with an absurd Govt. micro-managed joke that is doing more to destroy the US housing market than its easy to believe through enforcing credit guidelines that are so tight even the best borrowers get dizzy with the hoops. We have not gone back to sane lending as done before the latest housing bubble stupidity.... We have knee jerked FAR to the opposite side of the spectrum. Still, I am somewhat desperate to get an income stream coming in and mortgages are what I know. Hate yes.... But at least know.

I spent 20 hours in special licensing classes, had to spend tens of hours navigating the online hell that is the new National Mortgage Licensing System, had to take a National and State Licensing tests that made the SAT's look like cake (yet does absolutely nothing meaningful relative to all the problems that caused the housing debacle). The Feds are down right serious about making sure all loan professionals know exactly what all the cute acronyms for all the massive new Federal bureaucracies mean and how many new agencies said loan professional must now pay new and large annual fees too. I also had to get fingerprinted, retinal scan, anal probe.... Well, that first one at least for real. Also passport photo sent in and criminal background checks that I bet go beyond CIA screening for double-nought secret agents.

So now I have all my licensing stuff submitted, but I cannot actually take any actions to participate in the mortgage business until the license is approved. That means until the State of GA says I am approved to work and earn a living. Gee I sure hope they grant me the privilege!

I understand it may take awhile. There are apparently only a couple of guys at the Dept. of Banking and Finance who are working through a massive stack of licensing paperwork. The State takes in over $16 million a year in fees and fines from mortgage licensee's but all that money just goes into the States general fund so the Dept. has no funds to hire enough people to deal with all the paperwork all the new bureaucracies have mandated. So it could be after the first of the year before I am actually licensed. When I am.... What then? I have no idea if it is even possible to earn a living in the business now with all the issues with negative equity, declining property values and crazy tight credit standards.

Back in America.... Or Generica as Michele and I like to call it. Generic. Everything in the US sure seems the same. Walmart, Applebys, McDonalds....traffic jams...bad news on TV constantly and a simmering economic depression sitting like whipped cream on top.

I have tasted of the forbidden fruit, and it was SWEET. A shame really as it makes the fare that is my fate all the more bitter.

It has been far too long since I blogged... sorry for the lapse. We left Green Turtle Cay in the Abacos and headed directly for St. Mary's inlet at the GA/FL state line. We had great wind when we left and sailed for the first 10 hours or so, but after that it was mostly a motor boat trip as the wind died.

It took us 2.5 days before we got tied up at the marina downtown in Fernandina Beach, FL. Almost immediately after we were secure at the dock, a massive thunderstorm hit. We saw over 60 knots of wind, lightening everywhere, torrential rain and the power went out over the entire island. Its funny that the scariest thing we have experienced was after being tied up in a marina in FL.

We motored up the ICW to Jekyll Island, only bumping the muddy bottom once. No big deal. We got secured and shortly afterward met up with our friends on Amazing Grace II and Side by Side. It was fun having our friends hang around Jekyll with us for a week and the kids really had a blast but before we knew it they were both headed off north for the Chesapeake. At the time I thought it highly likely that we would see them again when we too headed north within a month or so.

We got a few boat projects done and then packed up to head to the Atlanta area to visit family and friends. After almost a week in Cumming, GA we headed north to Banner Elk, NC for the 4th of July holiday. It's a lot of fun there with a parade and fireworks plus the weather is very nice. After a week, we headed back down to Cumming and my parents house. I got a lot of paperwork crap done and was able to take care of some real estate messes. Productive and necessary but not exactly fun.

After being away from the boat for nearly 3 weeks we headed back to Jekyll Island. When we arrived, I discovered that while we were gone the rear A/C unit had died. I diagnosed a bad compressor and after speaking with the guys at Flagship marine who made the unit I shipped it back to them to be repaired under warranty. Our Lectra-San unit also had died and I had to order a new set of electrode plates to repair it. So boat projects continue.

After getting back to the boat, Michele began again having really bad fibromyalgia attacks. She suffers bad headaches, tingling electric shock feelings down both her arms and hands, tremors in her hands, numbness, deep muscle and joint pain in both her legs and arms, bad bladder pain.....and it all was getting rapidly worse. Much worse.

She has suffered from this for a number of years to varying degrees. Last year before moving out of our house to pursue this "episode" we pursued several treatment options very aggressively to try and get her as "better" as was possible and we had good success with this. I think we both felt confident that she would be able to undertake the cruising lifestyle and cope with her disease. We appear to have been wrong.

Things have gotten worse to the point where we have abandoned plans to head north and we are on our way back to the Atlanta area to seek treatment. We are taking Michele back to the Chiropractor and nutritionist who helped her before. We are also going to see a neurologist, as MS is a possibility we want to try and rule out and we are seeing a rhumatologist. We will also seek out any other specialists who may be able to help. Our entire focus at this point is on trying to get help for Michele so she can cope with the pain. We have gotten some serious pain medication and muscle relaxers to try and manage the severe pain in the meantime but this is just treating symptoms, not chasing a cure.

The reality of Fibromyalgia is that no cure is likely. This is a degenerative debilitating disease and though we hope to find ways of getting Michele back to being able to cope with day to day life the hard reality is that living the cruising lifestyle just does not appear to be something she can do.

So at this point, it appears we are done. I honestly cannot put into words my thoughts and feelings with this. Dreams die hard, but that's life. Now it's on to real problems: How to make a living? Where to live? How to pay for all the medical treatment Michele will need? When does school start and how do we get the kids going on that? Lots of stuff.

Lillie Mae is for sale. I am going to do my best to sell her myself, the thought of paying a broker 10% for shooting a few lousy photos and throwing it up on yachtworld.com is not something I can stomach. I will post another blog update with a VERY long and detailed description of the boat. If anyone is looking for a fantastic 3 cabin cruising yacht....Lillie Mae is IT. Any helps in selling her that anyone can provide is greatly appreciated.

It sorta looked like Sunday would better, now it not so much.... the wind is actually blowing outside right now so even though it will likely die tomorrow we are heading out. ETA St. Mary's Inlet is late Friday. Watch the spot!

Terry

RED ALERT! RED ALERT!

A confluence of events has altered our world perspective and changed our plans. Rum was involved.

The weather looks ugly. Not nasty ugly like in a hurricane or even thunderstorms or even high winds but quite the opposite. No wind. I hate no wind.

Our friends on Side by Side cruised into the harbor here with tales of a large supply of fresh conch on board. Angie swears she makes better fritters than the marina restaurant. I cannot let that challenge go untested. Its an honor thing.

Passageweather.com has 2 weather models.... they both say the trip back would be a motorboat ride. Yuck. There may be wind on Sunday. Why not wait and see? Yea, that sounds good. There is also the matter of the large power yacht docked at the fuel dock making our taking on of diesel a big hassle. I am just not in the mood for hassle, so why rush to tank diesel today?

If we get wind sooner, we go. If not, we go snorkeling and check out life at Spanish Cay.




---------------------------------

Well, its definitely summer time in the Bahamas and that means hot and humid. When Michele and I woke up in the middle of the night the other night and it was 90 degrees in the cabin we came to a mutual agreement that perhaps it was time to point the boat north!

We got a slip at the Green Turtle Club on Green Turtle Cay for a couple of nights and have been getting everything ready for the passage back to the states. AS things stand right now.... and plans have been known to change.... we will head out this evening and sail for St. May's inlet at the FL / GA border. Its about 350 miles but will not go in a direct line. We will head up around the Bahamas banks and veer west to pick up the Gulf Stream.

A cold front is passing to the north tonight and that should give us some wind. By late tomorrow morning the wind is going to die off and I expect a fair amount of motoring this trip. If we can get a boost from the Gulf Stream I expect the passage to take no more than 2.5 days so we hope to be in Friday morning. If we run into any weather or issue we will divert west to Florida. I hope we have wind!

Check the spot from the main page for our progress, we will have it on for the entire passage.

I will post more on our fun in the Abacos after we arrive.

We left Spanish Wells on a high tide and motored around the corner a few miles to Royal Island. The charts show that Royal Island is supposed to have a new marina opening in early 2010 along with a huge resort, condo development and giant Jack Nicholas golf course. The notes on the charts state that visitors are not allowed ashore and that the marina was going to take up the entire anchorage and when complete anchoring would not be permitted. I had a pretty good idea what to expect and I was not disappointed.

There were some backhoes and dump trucks sitting idle among some debris and a bunch of private property signs but that was it. Like just about every big resort development we have come across, this one got started and then fell apart. There is a theme along those lines in the Bahamas - Hey, lets raise a bit of money and start building a giant resort and people will buy in before its finished thus giving us the money to make it all happen! GREAT IDEA!

Uhhhhh NOT.

So we anchored up in the harbor at Royal Island and early the next morning we headed out to cross to the Abacos. No wind. I hate passages with no wind. We motored along at 6.5 knots and showed exactly the same on the apparent wind indicator. Yuck.

After a long, boring day staring at a flat sea and dodging only one freighter we arrived off North Bar Channel and motored through the cut. We headed in to Spencers Bight and dropped the hook in 9 feet of water. The first thing that struck us about the Sea of Abaco was the color. The water here is a definite green color and not the very light aquamarine color we are so accustomed to from the Exumas. It's a far darker color, the water is nowhere near as clear here. That's not to say the water is not clear, you can still see the blades of grass and ripples in the sand in 10 feet of water, but instead of looking through water that is vodka clear, your looking deep into a green tint.

The next morning we launched the dinghy and ran up to Sandy Cay. This is a park area and there are small boat moorings set up for use over a large area of reef indicated on the charts as a "coral garden". With our snorkeling gear set, we dove in to check this out. Amazing..... this was not a series of strung out coral heads but rather a giant interconnected reef spreading out all across the front of this small island. We saw coral of every shape and color including giant elkhorn coral, brain coral, fans and tons of stuff I have no idea what you call it. The fish were swarming, it was obvious they were used to divers feeding them.

We also checked out the ruins of Wilson City, extending out on the point of Spencers Bight. There were ancient brick supports for large docks, rock walls without roofs on a building and not much else. Later in Hope Town when touring the museum we learned that this had been one of the biggest settlements in the Abacos between 1908 and 1920. IT was a company town founded by a logging company that set up huge operations to exploit the forests on Great Abaco island. They had a huge mill, stores, housing, one of only 2 railroads in the Bahamas, a power plant (they had electricity before Marsh Harbor), and an ice factory. Now.... Almost nothing is left.

In the afternoon we yanked the hook and motored up around Tilloo Bank, anchoring just north of it. This was a fairly open anchorage and the bottom is thick grass. I hate anchoring in such grass, its generally poor holding but the forecast was for very light winds so I did not sweat it.. Jackson and I dove on the anchor and I set it by hand as best we could. We had a ton of fun swimming over the bank, the water was only 1-3 feet deep extending out over a mile from shore. We found lots of shells, sand dollars and sea biscuits. We had stingrays swim around among us and saw plenty of fish, including a barracuda about 4ft long.

That night it blew. I wanted to kill the weather man, the wind was gusting to over 20knots and I had a hard time thinking of anything else but the anchor nose being the only part buried in that hard grass bottom. Not a good nights sleep. The next morning I again dove the anchor and found it EXACTLY as we had left it. Clearly, my worries were unfounded.

We spent another day and night taking it easy at Tilloo bank and the next morning tried to figure out where we wanted to go next. Too many choices. We did know that we needed to laundry, in a bad way actually, and we needed some supplies so we settled on Marsh Harbor. I had no real desire to visit Marsh Harbor given that it's a fairly large tourist town but that's were the big laundramat was so off we went.

Tis shallow in Marsh Harbor. We came in at low tide and left a wake swirling with sand. The depth indicator said we had just a few inches over the 6ft we draw. Fun! If we did scrape it was only enough to clean off the bottom of the keel so I call that a bonus.

Next day, Michele cleaned up on board and got school done while I went ashore and did massive amounts of laundry, bought groceries, went to the pharmacy, got ice and checked some other shops. After a hard days work for both of us, we splurged and went to the rice restaurant at one of the marinas for dinner. Our first nice dinner out in over 4 months, we thoroughly enjoyed it!

Our friends on Amazing Grace II headed out early the next morning to head up to Treasure Cay. We wanted to see Hope Town so we made plans to meet up at the end of the week up around Treasure. Another few hours of motoring and high tide entrance into Hope Town (no chance to get in or out on a low tide) and we picked up a mooring ball.

Hope Town may be our new favorite place. It is jaw dropping pretty here. Sweet little houses (and some not so small) with porches, blooming trees and gardens, quaint little streets and walkways, ancient graveyards, interesting shops and a neat museum, an attractive beach, a working candy striped lighthouse.... It's the quintessential Bahamian resort town. The people are friendly and the atmosphere is laid back.

We walked all over the town and ate our bagged lunch down by the beach. We then walked over a neat little beach bar that had large gardens and a pool beside the bar area. The kids played in the pool for the rest of the afternoon while Michele and I caught up on our reading and ate some conch fritters. Life is hard.

I have made an interesting discovery here in Hope Town. Air Conditioning is an aphrodisiac. Its true.

The weather here I have been informed has become hot and muggy. I do not find it to be too hot, its only around 85 degrees during the day and 75 at night but it is sticky with humidity and Michele has declared it to be HOT. Hot equals misery for Michele. When Michele is too hot, we all suffer if you know what I mean.

So, I implemented Operation Michele Happy.

Like any large scale military plan, to be successful requires careful planning and quick thinking once action has begun. Step One: Get a marina slip. Yes, I broke down and got tied us to the side of the outer dock over at Hope Town Hideaways marina. This place has walking paths and beautiful gardens, a pool for the kids and best of all: POWER! Shore power equals AIR CONDITIONING!

Step Two: Turn both A/C units aboard the boat down to 68 degrees. Step Three: dinghy over to town and visit Vernons Grocery where fresh made Key Lime Pies are the specialty. Step Three: take the kids to the pool giving Michele alone time in the meat cooler the boat has now become.

Success! By evening, Michele was all smiles. We ate key lime pie and watched a movie in complete comfort. She slept under an actual blanket. The boat is crisply cold. The kids are starting school this morning wearing jackets.

Going cruising requires lots of flexibility and it takes some time to figure out the keys to making it work. Its different for everyone. For Michele, being happy chasing this lifestyle means NOT spending lots of time in places where it is very hot and humid. So, we are going to be watching the weather very close and beginning our planning for a passage back to Jekyll Island sooner rather than later. I would prefer to spend more time in the Abacos but we can do that when we work our way back up island earlier in the season next year.

Plans now are to get a slip at Jekyll Island Marina and keep the boat there through the end of July. That way we can enjoy all there is to do at Jekyll while having A/C aboard the boat. In early August, we are heading north until it is no longer hot, I am betting on that being Maine.

I posted a new gallery with photos from Hope town.