Okay so we did it, we made it to the one deadline we had to make this year. The southernmost town of the continental U.S. of (WTAF) A. We pulled it off, said goodbye to the fam and…what?
What now?
No, now we get to get back to the job at hand.
We’re going to sell an infernal-combustion engine or two, a RIB dinghy and write a whole bunch of sell-able fiction.
That’s the plan anyway.
We (James and Dena) are truly inspired by the experience of our last year at sea. We’ve sailed over 2000 nautical miles this year, anchored about three hundred times and written as much inspired fiction as we believe we could have. Now all we have to do is perfect each piece.
First, we gotta finish that Fatty Knees!
Tursiops was far from perfect when we got her. As a matter of fact, she was a broke-dick-god after leaning against the side of a house for a few years in West Palm Beach, Florida.
No, we got to completely transform this once-diminished dog into a tiny ship to be worshiped and admired!
I’ve always believed that 90% of all construction is in the cleaning of the the project. The only way to truly understand a project is to clean it to perfection…then clean it again and again and again.
And she was a very dirty girl.
But after my mother’s Celebration of Life, we got seriously motivated to finish what we’d started on Tursiops.
Our new rowing/sailing dinghy, S/V S.N. Sojourner Tursiops is almost ready for christening.
There will be revels.
We grinded, we fiberglassed, we sanded, we coated, we primed, and we painted until the cracks were gone and surfaces were fair to our liking. Now we get to unload the old one, the RIB that has been the bane of my (James’) existence for five years now.
You see, the problem I’ve always had with zodiac-style inflatable boats is: if they hold air at all they’re totally resellable in almost any market. That’s why I’ve always hated having one, because I’ve always thought someone would steal ours for its resell value alone. Fuck that!!!
No one wants to work to steal anything. If you steal a rowboat, you’re a dipshit or so you’re so fucking desperate I might just have some sympathy for you.
Nah…Anyway…
The point is, we rowed a dinghy for almost a decade in some of the “roughest” neighborhoods on the East Coast of the U.S. and never once worried about it getting stolen…EVER!
I can’t wait to go back to that reality.
So here we are, anchored off the southernmost town of the continental United (haha) States, once again about to revel in the freedom of the loss of one more infernal-combustion engine in the world.
Let the revels begin… again, and again!
We had a Fatty Knees, but we just couldn’t fit her on the foredeck of our Bristol 29.9. I still miss that dinghy. So easy to row, so fun to sail. We WILL have another one some day. I get wistful every time I see one. In the meantime, I’m 100% with you on deflatables. We may not have Pegu-Tini any more, but we still most definitely have a hard one. Nice job on bringing a classic back to life! Hope we share an anchorage one day.
…Right back at you Kimberly!
S/V S.N. Tursiops was splashed yesterday right about noon and it was good! She’s tracking beautifully behind us now in that stiff Key Western current. Can’t wait to test the sail rig.
Thanks again for stopping by.