What's up, and what's next?

By now you probably have seen Lynda's blog post about our decision to sell Away To Me and move back to land.

Where are we, and what's going on?

Yeah, it's been a bit since we posted anything. Sorry about that...but we didn't want to announce anything until our plans were pretty well locked in.

We left Tobago at the end of September and returned to Grenada. My tourist visa was expiring, and I couldn't get an appointment to renew it. Bureaucracy is a hell of a thing in Trinidad and Tobago. We would have loved to stay longer and see more of the island, but we aren't ones to overstay our welcome.

We were already talking with our broker about selling the boat (sort of the equivalent of a real estate agent in the boat world), and we knew there was some boat work that needed to be done.

While waiting for our haul out date at Clarke's Court marina in Grenada, I took a week and went to Puerto Rico to look at property. That was an adventure, but it was productive. More on this in a future blog post.

Right now, we are hauled out at Clarke's Court. The touch-up work on the coppercoat bottom paint is nearly complete, and they are applying antifouling paint to the saildrives and propellers.

I have replaced the lower saildrive seals, changed the oil in the engines and saildrives, and I replaced the oil filters for the engines. The zinc anodes have been replaced, too. I'm also starting to make a new anchor bridle (Trinidad was hard on the old one, it's covered in barnacles). Everything is refreshed for the new owners.

Oh, right, about that...we have buyers. The survey and sea trial went well, and they signed the acceptance letter for the contract. Closing should be within 2 weeks. The sea trial was quite an experience, I'll have to write a separate blog post on that...

Next week, a team will come out and do a thorough job with cleaning, waxing, polishing, and restoring all of the gel coat and stainless.

We are scheduled to splash at the end of next week. At that point, we have some more maintenance things to do while in the water (replace the raw water impellers and replace the fuel filters), but we should be able to do that in 2 days.

Once that is complete, we need to fuel up, get some food, and then set sail for Puerto Rico. Probably, we will sail north from Grenada to Carriacou to do a shakedown cruise, making sure that everything is still good before we launch on a longer passage.

In PR, we will move off of the boat and hand over to the new owners. That'll be the end of boat life, but not necessarily the end of boats - I plan to do occasional passages with friends on their boats, and Lynda and I may end up chartering boats now and then in beautiful locations.

We are excited to start the next chapter of our lives, and we hope that you will follow along!