Preparing for The Great Loop!

It has been a bit overwhelming to think about and prepare for what is next.  We have decided to embark on a “Bucket List” adventure.  We have been members of the AGLCA – America’s Great Loop Cruiser’s Association – for over a year now.  We have been inspired by friends and members to go for it!  Think for a minute…. how do you prepare to live on your boat for 8-9 months?  While traveling over 5600 miles around the eastern U.S. and Canada?  And not feel like you’re camping the whole time?  I’ve made so many lists of things to do, it’s crazy!

First order of business for Chief Operations Officer Kenny was to have a bow thruster installed.  This will make the Captain’s job much easier, when you consider we’ll be putting Island Girl into 100’s of new marinas as well as transiting over 100 locks – where better control of your vessel is a really good thing.  So we scheduled a time in January to pay somebody to put a hole in our boat!

This is a really big drill and the hole saw to cut the big hole.

Uh oh.  Uhhhhmmm, Captain?  I should not be able to see you through the hull of the boat!

This is looking in the hold underneath our bed in the bow.  Yep – there is daylight.

Here’s the brains and power of the operation.

And here’s the BRAAP-er, … and a happy captain inspecting it.

A new joystick at both the upper and lower helms.  Our favorite Minion, Stuart is guarding the controls.

While she was high and dry, Chief Maintenance Officer Kenny was able to buff out her hull and his (somewhat) able bodied assistant applied a sealant.  :).

He also repacked a rudder shaft, which can’t be done while the boat is in the water.

After we brought her home, Chief Communications Officer Kenny got to work on installing an AIS (Automatic Information System) transponder/receiver.  This device makes us visible to other marine traffic who also have AIS’s.  This will be particularly important when we travel the inland river systems among all of the commercial barge traffic.  This project strained Kenny’s brain a bit, to coordinate it with the VHF radio, the chart plotter, the automatic pilot, and all the wiring and antennas.  But he is an awesome researcher and ‘cipherer’, and he got it all figured out.  Also while wires were stringing about and panels were taken apart all over the place, some new ‘low-water’ buzzers were installed on the engines and at both helms.  This will be a quick alert if the engines are not getting enough water, before they overheat.

In the meantime, Chief Hotel Manager Karen was busy trying to make improvements for 8 months of living aboard.  Creature Comforts!  Remember?  No Camping!  The first thing we did was replace the blinds for the salon windows.  The old ones were salt pitted and starting to rust and in pretty bad shape.  This wasn’t easy, since the side windows are angled differently in the front and back.

We really had to customize, angle-cut, and restring some new mini blinds to work on these windows.  This is the old blinds laying on top of the new blinds. Only the forward end of the slats get cut at an angle, then the whole blind gets pulled toward the aft to fit the window.

Then I sewed up new valances and recovered a couple of the throw pillows to match.  I removed the dirty old dark green and burgandy ones and replaced them with clean new lighter colors.

TaDa!  New interior trim work!

Next up, I fashioned some outdoor carpets for the cockpit and the flybridge.

These are pretty light duty, so we’ll probably be lucky if they make it through the trip.  But my old 1976 Kenmore sewing machine did good work!

They sure make the areas feel more like living space instead of just – bare naked fiberglass.

The dinette upholstery was disintegrating, and the flybridge upholstery was beginning to tear at some seams.  Neither were going to make it through 8 months of constant use.  So we had new upholstery sewn up and sent to us from a company in Arlington, Washington.  We had to disassemble the dinette, and take apart the old pieces.  This was quite an undertaking!

We removed THOUSANDS of staples,

…and refit the new pieces with hundreds of staples.  Our house was a temporary upholstery shop.

Then we re-installed the furniture.

It looks great!  The new dinette…

…and the new fly-bridge seating.

Another improvement that we installed last year was the hardtop over the cockpit.  I’d been wanting canvas to go around the railings to keep things from flying off of the upper deck.  So when we had a local company make us some new isinglass windows for the flybridge, they also fitted the rails for canvas.  It turned out nice.  And creative Kenny made a new Island Girl sign to hang up there since the one on the stern of the boat is covered up by Stuart the dinghy.

We also acquired a new American flag to fly, (but it wasn’t up for this picture).

Then I recently found the fabric that I bought last year in the Bahamas.  It is called Androsia, which is Bahamian Batik.  I bought it thinking that I would re-cover some of the boat pillows.  Ta-Da!  All ugly pillows have now been recovered.

I even sewed up a jacket wrap for our dual shore power cords.  Hopefully this will make the cords easier to handle.  It already has helped keep some of the leaves and stuff from collecting in between the cords and making a mess on the boat.  Sometimes it’s just the little things that help in little ways that make a nice difference here and there.

And then something fun, but more functional than you might think!  For each helm, I fixed up a red/green indicator.  While following waterways, there are red and green markers indicating the channel that we should be in.  Sometimes green is on the starboard (right), sometimes it is on the port (left).  It can change when you change channels or waterways.  So it can be quite helpful to have a reminder on the helm.  So we have Cars at one helm, and Mike Wazowski and Red Armor Baymax at the other.  The captain can turn them to match the channel markers.  They work great!  And it makes the captain smile because his navigator likes to be silly… and functional.

Not that all of these things HAD to be done, but I’m hoping some of it will make extended living on the boat a little more comfortable and enjoyable.

Meanwhile, Chief Safety Officer Kenny worked on a few things to make our trip safer.  Among items acquired are new large fenders (bumpers), and ropes to facilitate more protection in all of the locks and marinas.  We will also be anchoring out more than usual.  We bought a new anchor last year after a failure-to-set challenge we had in the Bahamas.  But the new big anchor wasn’t behaving real great on the existing swivel and roller set up, so we got a new heavy duty swivel.  And it was too big for the existing roller.  So Kenny fashioned a whole new set up to accommodate the nice big heavy duty swivel and now the anchor fits better too.

Windshield wipers and motors have been replaced.  That was no small task either!  It was way more work than one sentence in a blog represents!  Engines have been flushed.  Oil changed.  Steering bar sanded and repainted.  Return fuel coolers replaced.  The list goes on.

Next up … what do we put on board for this journey?  How do we pack for living aboard?  How do we conserve space yet have what we need to not feel like we’re camping the whole trip?

And logistics!  What do we do with mail, and bills, and medications, and taxes, and – our moorage spot???