Previously on… There we were, sitting in the cockpit of our rollicking sailboat, a meteor having just streaked across the sky. The boat had rocked and rolled all night long, overwhelming us with nausea. The moment the sun peeked over the horizon, we took off, ready to leave this anchorage behind forever. Kadin set our course on the chart plotter, and began steering us south towards Norfolk, Virginia. As the sun climbed higher the wind receded, but the steady lope of the bo

The day Kadin and I decided to make our relationship official, he asked me what I thought about living on a sailboat. I put exactly zero thought into my answer and said I was totally down. Damned hormones. Fast-forward a year, and we were driving to the northernmost point of the Eastern Shore of Virginia to look at a nearly derelict sailboat. It had been sitting in dry storage for ten years. Dry is a misnomer. Although the fiberglass hull is solid, various bad spots on the de

The roads are finally all passable a few weeks after Hurricane Florence hit the North Carolina shore. I knew our boat had survived because I had gotten pictures from Russ the owner of the slip. However, I needed to look in the boat and make sure that it had not taken on too much water and that the bilge pumps continued to perform. As I headed out I realized that there were many who experienced quite a bit of loss. Don, a friend of ours, has a home right in Oriental that wa

We knew it was going to happen at some point and now we are in the middle of riding out our first hurricane. Our boat is sitting in a private slip in Oriental, NC. While this town only has a population of 900 people it is the center of the sailing universe in NC. Nestled in the mouth of the Neuse river where it opens into the Pamlico sound, Oriental offers good protection and easy access to major waterways. We discovered Oriental on our way back to NC after we purchased our

Sometimes I bite off a little more than I can chew. Fixing up the sailboat is not the only thing left. Although, we wanted to cast off the lines and roam the seas till we are too weak and feeble, we needed a little bit more financial security to make things flow better. So just before we got married we decided to buy a house. This is not only to build equity but to hopefully rent out the house and to have a passive income stream to continue our adventures. While tempting

Back in 2014, I was in my little office looking at YouTube and I came across SVDelos. I am sure that most people in the sailing community have watched at least one of their videos. I was completely mesmerized by their lives. At that time there wasn't a ton of videos that they had uploaded so it was easy to start from the beginning of Bryan and Brady's adventures and binge with a healthy jealousy. Soon, I had run out of video content and I needed more to feed my appetite.

Doing an inventory on everything on the sailboat and then deciding what is salvageable and what is not. We soon realize that less is salvageable than we hoped. We bought this sailboat on the cheap. We were expecting there were going to be things that we needed to fix. My anticipation of projects far underestimated what we were going to have to do to make this boat seaworthy again. Here are a few pictures of what the boat looked like when we first stepped in.

“We bought a sailboat.” “This is crazy. You know this is crazy right?” “Do you think we can call her and tell her we changed our minds?” “WE BOUGHT A SAILBOAT.” “What was I thinking.” “Babe, we own a sailboat.” “This is crazy.” And that was just Kadin. We took a walk around the boat one more time, Kadin inspected some questionable spots with the Marina Owner and asked his opinion on repairs, while me, my mom and the boat owner, Heather, muddled around and made small talk. I t