Okay...I've been a crummy blogger.

But this blog is about cruising and, for the past few years we haven't been doing a lot of that! Yes, we've gotten out sailing a fair bit, even lived aboard for much of the past summer, but all in our local bay...nothing that really inspired me to document it here.

BUT...The dream is festering and, once again, we have decided to act as though we are going cruising next year and do the things we need to do to make that happen. The last time we tried it, we actually went cruising! So this time, I'm going to blog the preparatory parts. And what a prep its going to be! The kids have school until the end of June, which gives us six months to do the refit prior to undertaking The Grander Scheme. Yes, its a few days before Christmas and there's snow on the ground and ice in the water, but the refit is underway!

Or, more accurately, the preparation for the refit is underway. The first step was last fall when, rather than storing Northern Symphony outside under her winter cover, we had the yard pull the mast and slide her into an unheated shed: We'll be able to work on her without exposure to the wind and precipitation. We also realized that we need a place to work on the portable parts of the project: A shop. Unfortunately, our garage looks like this:


Actually, that's only half of our garage, but the other half is where our car lives. So, the first step is to get all that non-shop stuff out of the shop, which led to one of the stranger boat re-fit projects: Building a shed. Well, it took me pretty much all of the fall season, thanks in part to a busy travel schedule, but I did get it done...Now I can move the stuff in garage and begin converting it into a shop. That's my holiday project...