Getting ready to leave

We truly started this journey more than 9 months ago. Once we had secured a locum to cover my work, we set to work getting ready to go. Our first major step was selling our home so we could buy the boat. Not a financially sound choice; I can almost hear what my accountant father would have said, but there you have it. On the positive side, we were outgrowing the house we were in anyway, and were selling when the market wasn’t far off it’s peak and about to take a down turn.

To sell our house we had to spruce up the kitchen a little and finish off lingering home improvement tasks around the house. Admittedly, it was nice to have the motivation to finish them and enjoy the ‘completed’ house for a while. We also needed to get rid of some stuff. A LOT of stuff. We are a family of 6 and we like our activities, so we had a full house. Plus, being an engineer, Kevin likes to prepare for any and every eventuality, which means having a lot of options for gear. We managed to get our house on the market by June. Then we enjoyed our summer. Owen had baseball camp to go to and Kevin took several sailing courses to get himself certified and back at the helm. His sailing courses took him on trips around the gulf islands here in BC.

Our house sold at the start of October and part of the process of selling had us ensure there wasn’t a oil tank in our yard. Rather than pay for somebody to dig up the yard, we dug a hole ourselves to see what solid object was detected by the sounding machine 4 feet below the grass. It turned into a family affair, with each of us helping finished the task. It was the last household task to get the house sold.

With the successful sale of our house, the next big step was buying a boat! We knew we wanted a catamaran because it would give us more space. Furthermore, Halyna has had troubles with motion sickness in the past, and we are hoping there will be less rolling with a catamaran. In order to have enough cabins, we also though we needed at least 50 feet. When you have limited time and certain specifications you go where the boats are. There were several that we looked at all over the world, but the one we were able to find that fit our needs was a Fountaine Pajot Eleuthera 60 located in Grenada. It had a list of repairs it needed due to the fact that it had been neglected for several years but it came at the right price tag. Kevin, with his dad, made a trip down to Grenada in late November to check out the boat just before we bought it. It was also just before we moved out of our house.

The later part of November and early December were all about moving out of our home. We had been there for 7 years and they were the only home Simon and Norah remembered, so it was tough. We had to organize our things into 3 piles – things to go into storage, things to go with us to the rental house until we left and things that would be needed on the boat. The stuff that was going into storage actually went into two 20 foot steel boxes that were delivered to our house and packed and then taken away. We packed them tight and were just about at capacity!

We are currently in a fully furnished vacation rental house for a total of three and a half months. We had Christmas in this house, so we had to bring our Christmas decorations. Those will be put into a smaller storage unit we already had when we leave, along with our bikes, which we wanted to continue to use while we were still here. Kevin went down to the boat for 3 weeks in January and took Owen with him. Together they did some of the major repairs on the boat and sort of got the ‘lay of the land’ too. They figured out what supplies were already there and what kitchen wares we needed to bring down. Now, at just 5 weeks until the start of our trip, Kevin has to go down one more time to finish up the repairs.

In the coming weeks we have to re-organized our stuff, put some in storage, pack and figure out how to get much of our stuff down to Grenada. Kevin, Owen and Halyna are also going to take a scuba diving course and I will be wrapping things up at work. And finally, Norah and Simon have been working hard at learning how to swim! They take their final swimming lessons that end 2 days before we leave.