"Just Get Off the Dock and Go"

Boat projects tend to work like this.  Image found here.

This is the advice that so many would-be, wanna-be, and soon-to-be cruisers get from people.  "Just go".  So simple, so Nike...It's good advice, and I think we've even given it to folks before...but now, I am biting my tongue.  The fact is, it is much easier said than done.

I mentioned that we've had a couple of "small" projects morph into much, much larger projects (I mean, our boat's interior was literally removed the other day to install some deck hardware).  Yesterday we learned that the easy "fix" for the "small" project (that had turned into a "large" project), is actually not going to be that easy at all.  In fact, it now involves more deck work and four times the time we had allotted for it.  For those of you boater folk who are actually curious, this entire scenario involves our new stays'l car track.  Not twenty-four hours after it was 5200'd it to the deck, it began to leak (hooray for rain), leading our rigger to believe the foam core deck and headliner is compressing and therefore preventing a good seal, letting water in.   After making that diagnosis, he concluded that our deck is not strong enough for the track as it is.  So now, we need to re-do the whole track with a backing plate twice the size, inject epoxy in the space between the headliner and coring and, of course, use a LOT more caulking before we put the paneling back together.  Hidden leaks are the enemy.  Sigh.  Better to find out now than later...

And that simple notion, the whole "better now than later" is the very reason it's so hard to pare down our to-do list(s) with "essential" items and get outta dodge, as it were.  It's so hard to be here in Ft. Lauderdale, a city literally teeming with anything and everything 'boat', and not take advantage of it.  How can we ignore the fact that parts, work, services and more are so much more plentiful and cheaper here than down island?  We have fallen into the dreaded habit of adding projects to our never-ending list because there are just so many resources.  It is so easy to fall down the rabbit hole of boat projects when you are in a place practically designed to accomodate them.  The problem, however, is not that we keep tacking on projects (okay, yeah, this is the problem - it's just so tempting) but that the projects themselves seem to uncover more and more projects like Russian dolls.  Which is why the interior of our boat is not back in today like we hoped and why we are still living in a disaster area that resembling a dorm room/daycare/worksop with a mess of take-out containers, bins, baby toys and tools lying all over the place.  Sounds fun, right?

But this is life on a boat.  We should know better than to be surprised by this.  We've been down this road before and anyone who has ever worked on a boat knows that once you peel back one layer of the onion, there's another one underneath it.  News flash to those of you who are not here yet:  The work is never, ever finished.  Which is why we will, in fact, just pick a date and go (weather permitting, of course).  In the meantime, we'll just keep ticking things off the list...and eventually, in the next couple of weeks, we will "just do it".  SWISH!