Miami - Getting ready to go

Miami

Yesterday was my last day of work, I am now officially on vacation.  Our boat is on the hard at Manatee Bay Marine in Key Largo, we are getting the bottom painted and installing a new VHF+AIS receiver.  Our mainsail is at the loft getting some reefing points added, we have yet to buy a dinghy and a few other important things for our trip.  I'm pretty sure many of the items in my to-do list will just have to wait.

Our boat, Seas The Moment, is a 1982 Catalina 27 Standard rig, we hope she will be able to take us safely across the Bahamas and hopefully much farther!  We have owned her for a little over a year and she has taken good care of us so far.  She seems to be solidly built and her previous owners have taken very good care of her.  This is our third sailboat and we bought her from a good friend who decided to move back to Peru, we were looking for a boat because we didn't feel that the boat we had at the time would be a good fit for extended cruising.  We were looking for something small, comfortable, in good shape, easy to repair, and with a big bimini (something our previous boats did not have!).  We found Seas The Moment and it fit all of our criteria, so we made a deal!  We have not spent as much time sailing this year as we would have liked but I suppose we will catch up on all this soon.


We have been flirting with the idea of sailing south for a while, it seemed like an impossible dream to pursue (time, money, common sense, etc), but lately everything seemed to fall into place and we have decided to try it out.  If successful, we are hoping to go as far south as Cartagena, Colombia, but for now, we are focused on getting our boat back and making it to Bimini, Bahamas.  For the last couple of years I have been devouring all of the literature on making this trip, we know it is not an easy or comfortable trip, especially for a small, fin keeled vessel with an outboard, but we believe that as long as we are patient on the weather, we should be able to make every leg of the trip in safety and comfort.