As bizarre as the title to this blog may seem, today it really rang true. As you may know, we are into our 10th year of cruising: living on Leu Cat, day in and day out for most of that time. I have worked on just about every system and equipment piece that is on Leu Cat. One would think that I know her inside and out by now. Well, you would be correct … almost. You see, today I had to sit down and list out every piece of equipment - its name, its manufacturer, its model number and its year of origin - that Leu Cat has. It took me all day and by the time I was through, I was very frustrated, very tired and very grumpy.

This past weekend, I had inventoried all of the equipment using a walk-thru technique which means that if I saw it, I listed it. With that list, I then went to our original purchase order form that we submitted to the Lagoon folks back in December 2005 and revised it by adding or subtracting items so that my inventory was up to date. Lagoon used that form to give us its purchase price ($586,520) and then spec out the boat to build it for us. Once we moved on board, we added another $75,000 worth of equipment to make her blue water safe and comfortable and over the last 10 years we replaced or upgraded (what I call retrofit) another approximately $75,000. Our latest major retrofit was just completed a few weeks ago when we replaced all of the standing rigging, which cost about $11,000. We did this believing that we would immediately begin our sail across the North Atlantic with intent on reaching the Med and spending another 3 to 4 years there before returning to the Caribbean in 2021 and selling Leu Cat at that time.

However, as we have discovered, the weather gods had a different idea and are still huffing and puffing across that ocean, making it untenable to us to achieve our goal. Thus, with Leu Cat in excellent mechanical and physical condition, we decided now is the best time to end our cruising lives and sell Leu Cat. In getting ready to do that, the broker that we are talking with required us to list not only every bit of equipment we have on her but, today he sent us a form that requires all of the additional information that I mentioned in the first paragraph.

Have you ever tried to retrieve and collate all of the registration forms, user manuals and invoices for all of the stuff you have in your house? It is a royal pain in the arse. Fortunately, I have kept all of the literature for everything we have ever bought in one location. I have also kept the vast majority of every invoice we received and stored that in a separate location. Thus, I spent hours and hours today, matching equipment item on my inventory list to its literature and then to its invoice to get the specific information the broker and his @%$#* form required. It was an ugly day and I am not sure how Mary Margaret could stand to be on Leu Cat with me. What was so bad was there were a few items where I could not locate the manual or invoice I needed and it made for a very frustrating day. Grrrrr!

However, it is now all done and I must say, I really now know Leu Cat, inside and out, topside and bottom and from very every angle imaginative.

I guess it is now time to sell her and forget all of those details as we move on to the next phase of our lives…