Back in the van, jack!

Yes, I’ve been very quiet in the past few weeks. I’m not much the kind of guy to give a play-by-play of each individual repair or upgrade I do, either on the van or the boat, so I have spared you all that tedium. Needless to say, I was working on final repairs on the boat with a December 10th deadline to get them all done. The 10th was the scheduled haul-out day so the professionals could accomplish a few repairs that could only be done with the boat out of the water. Leak prevention, sail removal, and wood preservation was the name of the game for two weeks.

So, after two soggy days of moving most things back into the van, we are officially van-dwellers again as of the afternoon on the 9th. The morning of the 10th I cranked up the motor on the sailboat, eased it out of it’s slip, and motored it to the crane to have it lifted out of the water. It was left in the hands of the repair shop and Kerri, Moose, Byron, and myself all piled into the van to start the 800+ mile journey back to family in California.

Ironically, in the recent months that Kerri and I have been in Washington, my family (Mother, Sister, and Bro-in-law) decided to move from California to the Seattle area. As is customary in my family, once the decision was made, a house was purchased within days and the move date was scheduled. And it is that move that I am going all the way to California for – to help drive my Mother up to Washington. The plus side of all this is that they will be very nearby when we return to the boat in March/April.