Progress, in spite of myself
16 June 2009
• RNSYS, Halifax, NS
by Mike
I have just cast an eye over my last few postings and have realized with a bit of a shock that I have not been quite as regular as I had been during our cruise. The trouble is that tied up alongside things just aren't as interesting, at least to me. I have finally realized why friends like Steve Kempton and his sweetie Judy stopped posting when they returned to Halifax after their cruise the previous year. They simply had other things to do. In my case, however, I am smitten by the blabber-mouth bug and have illusions of someday writing something other than the cookbook that I have already penned, and this blog, and this is a great way of flexing my composition muscles, so to speak. So if nobody screams with too much outrage or calls the prose police, I plan to continue. I just won't be posting every day. It would be really great to get a dialogue going if any of you have the urge.
Barb is just about finished her trip accounting. She has done way, way more than I expected, but, considering her IT background I really should have anticipated that she would have done something of the sort. She has taken all of our expenses and broken them out in a spreadsheet to clearly show what costs we incurred over the trip, when, and for what. We plan to try to get it posted on the blog site, but be warned, it is quite big. However, for those of you planning a trip on the boat you might like to take the trouble and expense to download it and look it over. We have found that most of the articles in the various cruising magazines that we read before the trip were way to general and made huge assumptions regarding what you were going to spend on. In our case we had big plans to be frugal but they got blown out of the window for a variety of reasons - we had some serious unexpected, costly equipment failures, we stayed at marinas way mare than we had planned, we helped our kids to travel to Florida to visit us for the Christmas holidays, and a lot more with the end result that the 9 months cost us almost $60,000 and even that is with some great savings that we were able to realize with the help of friends like Bob and Hilde in St Petersburg who got us a great car rental deal, and Snoozer in Marathon who helped us get a free anchorage for 6 weeks, and Jim in New London/Groton to got us a free dock for a week and was a good friend and host while we were there! The one advantage of the accounting that Barb has maintained is that we can now see where we might be able to cut corners. If you want, when we post the spreadsheet, you might want to save a copy and then make use of the basic sheet for your own usage. Just don't delete the formulae in the individual cells.
The photo accompanying today's post is of the nearly completed tool crib. It has been roughed out, a layer of oak veneer ply glued to the surface, trim applied and the whole shebang stained to match the wood in the rest of the cabin. Our friend Maury on Gypsy Sails in Norfolk may recognize the door in the photo as coming from the cockpit grating from Mr Pomeroy's boat which unfortunately sank at the dock earlier this year. Part of Stowaway, at least, will continue to sail as part of Nelleke. We still have to put the upper door in and add a couple more coats of clear varnish, but other than the door fabrication and install that is something that Barb has taken on, so I can get going with the next project, the companionway stairs cupboards.
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