A bit of explanation

It seems that all of my best ideas (not that I've had many) are started with some notes on a bar napkin over a few cocktails. These ideas have always seemed brilliant at the time and some have even turned out that way. Well, that's the way the name of our boat came about. A few years ago we were sitting at the Thompson Road Cabana Club with some good friends thinking about our future, specifically, our future on a boat. We began talking about names for our future home and began putting a few down on said bar napkin. Before long I was hit with a bolt of rum infused inspiration! Chasing 80!! As in degrees!!! That is where we always want to be. No more snow and ice and cold and wind...well, you get the point. Mind you, this was long before we had even begun looking for our dream boat but we had a name and that was a good start.

Why, you may ask, am I telling you this now? Well, it seems that when we tell people of our plans and the name of our boat 80% ask; "Oh, 80 years old"? While that's not a bad goal (mine happens to be a bit more) that's not the reason for the name. To hopefully make things a bit easier on people when they see the boat Jill came up with a little mascot to help get the point across and last week we officially had the boat lettered.....

Chasing 80 (degrees)

 Sorry for the poor picture but we are excited to finally have the name on the boat! Now it is time for the re-naming ceremony!!

It was a short trip last week to take some more of our personal items to the boat and celebrate my birthday then back home to keep working on the house. Hopefully the boat will soon be our home. Please keep your fingers crossed for us.

On another note, we have figured out why our marina is called Green Turtle Bay...

Not sure if they're green but they sure look hungry!

For those of you that have signed up for updates using the link on the right, I understand that it sends the whole post, not just something telling you to go to the blog. I imagine this could be a problem if we make a post with a bunch of pictures. I will see if there is something I can do on my end to change that.

That's it for now. Stay tuned for some exciting news from the home front (we hope).

Spring!!

Now this is more like it! We got back to the boat in early April and found much better conditions than our last visit. The trees were budding (allergies went into overdrive), the marina was getting ready for their spring boat show and the weather was perfect.

Boats for sale

We got a few more projects checked off our list. One nice addition are the new name boards we had made for the running lights. Before we could add the boards we had to perform the official boat "un-naming" ceremony. Not as much fun with just 2 of us to do it but it had to be done before we could move forward. If you're interested in the process just do a quick Google search and you'll find plenty of hits.

Another spring project was to get the dinghy inflated and the motor mounted. We hadn't had a chance to blow it up since we had it repaired last fall. Everything seemed to be working well. We took it out for a couple of trips to make sure all was good and it was. As we were leaving the marina we were greeted by an eagle keeping an eye on things.

That's about it for this update. Once we got home we headed off for a 12 day trip around the Southeast. A family wedding in Isle of Palms SC and then over to NOLA for the first weekend of Jazzfest including a Buffett performance to end the weekend. Since then we have been working on the house to get it back on the market so I can finally retire (for real) and we can get started on our adventure. Hopefully we'll have some good news to share about that in our next installment. I'll leave you with one last picture of Chasing 80 nestled in her slip waiting to get moving. Soon, very soon...

Can we go somewhere?