Getting it All Together
At the time of this publication, we will be in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico on the way to our first stop of Miami. See where we’re at HERE!
David and I moved to St Thomas at Thanksgiving, 2019. David stayed in St Thomas for nearly four months while I traveled back and forth between the States and the USVI over that same time period. Our original timeline for traveling back to the States had us departing St Thomas on March 31, 2020; however, with all of the COVID craziness, we decided it would be prudent to head home early. We left St Thomas on March 18, 2020 and it was a good thing we did because they started cancelling flights and within a few days our original flight had been cancelled.
Before we left, we had hired Yacht Equipment Services (Y.E.S) to do a lot of work on Verano. She needed a major facelift if we were to feel comfortable sailing her across the Gulf and into the Atlantic. They did a fantastic job and we’ll go into more of the details in a later blog, but our floating home was pretty torn apart when we arrived home on March 18. We would have two nights to sleep on Verano before taking her to the yard for more work. Our friends Tara and Travis on SV RumAway moved things around enough that we were able to sleep onboard those two nights.
After getting the mast unstepped for some rewiring and cool additions, Verano was put up on the hard. This was supposed to be a two week project so David and I stayed in an Air BNB in Kemah so we could be close to all of the goings on. After a few set backs and some local restrictions on hauling out and splashing, we finally got Verano back in her slip after three weeks. We would still have to return to the yard to have the mast re-stepped, we were so excited to actually get back on our floating home.
Not knowing what was going to be happening in the world when we were ready to go, I started provisioning for our 14-18 day sail and what could potentially be an additional 14 days of quarantine once we arrived in St Thomas. It was difficult to do as the stores were limiting canned goods, paper goods and fresh meat after the COVID run on the grocery stores. Each day I would make rounds at 2-3 different stores gathering as many cans and dry goods as I could. I stored all of this in the back of my rent car over the course of almost four weeks while waiting for Verano to come home.
A few days after getting settled back in the slip, Ashton and I carried in ALL of the food and dry goods to inventory and store. It was an all day process but we got it all stowed. We thought that was the end of it, but each day we brought more and more onto Verano as we worked to get our lives settled. In the middle of this, Ashton was furloughed from her job and her divorce was final so she decided to go with us and start a new life in St Thomas so she moved aboard Verano. This meant that everything we had stowed, stored in the forward berth had to be moved somewhere else on the boat so she could get settled in.
Continuing over the next four weeks after getting Verano back in her slip, we continued to have Y.E.S. contractors working on our boat making it difficult to get much done during the day hours. We spent a lot of time finding other things to do while they had floor boards up and running cables and wiring. As we thought we were finally done with contractor work, we set a date of May 4 to leave.
We took Verano out for a test sail on May 2 and found that several of the systems had issues. Although it was a nice day sail, it meant that we wouldn’t be able to leave on the 4th. Y.E.S. came back out on May 4 and spent a week fixing our original AC wiring and putting in a new Multifunction Display (MFD) and radar. We set our next leave date for May 10 as the weather looked it would be a good weather window. Our test sail on May 9 saw another issue and we would have to put off leaving again. Since we didn’t get to leave on the 10th I was able to spend a lovely afternoon with my mother, kids and sisters and their families for Mother’s Day while David stayed on the boat working on boat stuff.
On May 11 our Y.E.S. contractor came back to work through the last issue with David. They were able to figure out what the issue was and fixed it. On May 12 we finally said “See you later” to our friends and family in Kemah and headed to Galveston to wait out our weather window. So now it’s May 14 and we are finalizing all of our chores to leave tomorrow midday. We are headed to Miami where we will stay for a couple of days. Once we have our weather window there we will head for St Thomas. We are so super excited to finally have our journey start!
Until Next Time,
Cindy, 1st mate of S/V Verano
