Hindsight is 20/20

This last few weeks has been challenging because we haven’t been able to do much on the repair! We were waiting for supplies to arrive. Also, I had another reaction with my hands. We are now suspicious that it was a reaction to the styrene in the resin because apparently gloves do a poor job of preventing it from getting through. This meant I was out of commition for a few days with very swollen sore hands again. Furthermore, Kevin hurt his back and has been very limited in his activities for over week now. He is slowly recovering but it has really put a damper on the repair job. Lesson learned, bend at your knees and pull with your arms and not your back!

Because the repair is going so slowly, we have just been focusing on healing and schooling the children. I don’t have anything to report on the repair or things we have seen around Port Canaveral. We have the mold ready to go again though. We have tried to take care of some other minor upgrades around the boat as well – things we had planned to do before the accident and have the supplies for. We replaced the backsplash to our stove top and we replaced the cockpit lighting. The wires for these lights were stuffed into tight holes in the hardtop and as a result some metal parts on the back were touching the wires and they had heated up and melted together. Eventually, they started to short and burn out, one by one. When we arrived here in Port Canaveral, none of the cockpit lights were working anymore. This was a bit tricky because the new ones we bought, we slightly bigger than the ones from before, so we had to widen the hole that was there by a small fraction, without cutting the wires. We managed though and the new lights have a better set up on the back to prevent overheating the wiring. Of course, once we managed to get them in, Kevin also discovered that the grounding of the lights was poor and this will need to be replaced before they work again.

We are most definitely wrapping up our trip now. This repair has been long and hard. We are hoping we can at least plug the hole in the boat with the replacement piece before heading home. Kevin will come back in the coming months for short trips to finish up the repairs (i.e. scarfing in the piece properly and repairing the bulkhead and floor stringers) and then again to take the boat up to the Chesapeake. It is not the end of the trip that we had envisioned. That said, we have had quite the adventure! I suspect I only have a couple more posts to do before I am back in the swing of land life. I will post when we have completed the repair and another short update when we have put the boat up on the hard in the Chesapeake for long-term storage. Therefore, I want to spend the rest of this post talking about what we would have done differently. Unfortuantely, or not, although “life can only be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards” (Soren Kierkegaard).

1. We would have left Carriacou earlier. We were worried that if we ran into any troubles moving the boat up to Sint Maarten that we would be harmed or the boat injuried. We waited so long and we still had a problem but we were able to manage it! However, by staying in Carriacou so long, the initial costs of repairs were much greater than we had thought they would be. It is expensive to ship boat parts to remote areas. We would have been better off doing more of the repair in a more populated area, even some place like Sint Maarten.
2. We should have focused more on enjoying ourselves and less on boat jobs. Yes, we wanted a functional boat, but we had a large list of wants and probably could have had a smaller list of needs. This was to the detriment of less water activities and sight-seeing. We recognize that we saw a lot, but we could have done more. We only swam off the back of our boat about 6 times. Halyna did a better job then the rest of us because she also went kayaking or paddleboarding about a dozen times.
3. We wouldn’t buy the supplies for a boat job until we were ready to tackle it. There is still a list of things we want to do to the boat and we have the supplies for it, but not the time. If we hadn’t had our accident we would likely have gotten to them, but now we haven’t and we still have all the stuff.
4. We would be more strict with the kids schooling. We have the kids on a very strict schedule now, but it means that Owen and Halyna are playing catch-up to makes sure they are ready for the next grade when they start in September. Alternatively, Simon and Norah are doing great. Owen and Halyna will have no problems catching up before September, but I would still be better about this if I were to do it again.
5. Despite saying I would do less boatjobs – I would have replaced the toilets sooner!
6. We should have done a slightly better job with our temporary repair of the damanged hull and gone to Cuba and Mexico as planned. Then, we could have put the boat up on the hard sooner and come back to repair it at a much later date. That way we would have ended our trip on a better note and repaired it when we were more capable.
7. If we had left Carriacou earlier, we would have spent more time in the Carribean on the way up. Especially Martinique. We really enjoyed it and it had so much to offer, but we only got 3 days there.
8. We would have stuck to our budget better. We fell pray to the thinking at the start that we still have lots of our budget and contingency funds left, so we can spend more at the start! But too many other things come up and it would have been better to save it for later.
9. We probably would recommend the stiff, less expensive solar panels that make an array over the dinghy davits like so many other people have done, rather than the flexible walk on panels on the hardtop. These do not provide an equivalent increase in energy compared to the increase in cost, and we think they might heat up the inside of the deckhouse when not in use.
10. Kevin would probably have just bought a new anchor chain rather than re-galvinizing it. Although, it worked for our purposes and budget, it will still need to be replaced because it is thinner than a new chain of the same quoted diameter.
11. We had our main sail repaired 3 times and it still doesn’t work very well. It is very old. If we had adjusted our budget to permit it, we would have just got a new one.
12. We would have connected with other kid boats sooner.
13. We would never have anchored our boat in the anchorage in Goat’s Cay, Georgetown!

There are however, many things that we are very happy with. We are torn about the improved electrical system. It took so long to set up, but it truely is superior to what we had before and often our system works more smoothly than those we have encountered on other boats. We feel like we can do all the regular stuff we did at home with our new system including constant use of air-conditioning, remote work over the internet at all hours and cooking full holiday meals. However, we could have just updated the batteries and been done much sooner with the electrical upgrade. We are also happy with the improvements in the kitchen. Our stove top and oven are better than we have had in many of our houses previously. We are also very relieved to have the use of a washing machine/dryer. We are very happy we were able to get our fridge and freezer working so well. They are large and we are happy we never had to find a substitute for the custom fit set the boat came with. We are happy with the rigging upgrades and other rope work we did. We are also happy with the places we did visit. We love that we have now explored and know many of the place on the east coast that are sights of historic significance or just frequently mentioned in pop culture.

We will forever be thankful for the time we got to spend together as a family. This trip has been challenging on our relationships, but I think in the end we will all be closer because of it. We like spending time with each other! We have a saying in our family, “Families stick together” and this holds very true for us. We will undoubtably laugh about many of our trials and tribulations in the near future, thought we lament them now. We are learning how to better communicate with each other and how to express our frustrations or desires. On a boat, even the size of ours, other people’s emotions are felt acutely. These have to be addressed before they spread.

We return to life on land with a renewed vigor for work and everyday life (at least the adults do). And of course, a desire to explore more! We have unfullfilled destinations/plans and in some way, at some time, we will find a way to see the places that we had hoped to see, and do the things we had hoped to do when we set out on this adventure.