Nirvana Is In Florida .. FINALLY!

After reviewing our blog, I realized that my last post was about our solar panel project. Since then, we actually left the dock in Louisiana! Leaving the dock wasn't easy, and realizing that our teak bowsprit was rotten just days before leaving didn't help! We were determined to not let this setback stop us from leaving, and with the help of a friend a new bowsprit was built and installed within a week! The new bowsprit was made by gluing pieces of Mahogany and Ipe wood together and then varnishing. Actually, it wasn't near as easy as it sounds, but that's the basics of it. We are so thankful for our friend's help. Without him, we may have been set back for many more weeks .. thanks Martin! 

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After finishing the bowsprit, we needed to install our new Mantus anchor .. it's a beast!

 After installing the anchor, we tackled a lot of last minute projects. There were so many things that needed to be done at the last minute, like storing our truck at my Dad's place, filling up the jerry cans, hauling our dinghy from storage & getting it inflated and placed on the bow, filling up our boat with groceries, and all sorts of random things. We were exhausted the night before we left, and our heads didn't hit the pillow till around 11pm that night. We didn't even have time to hang out with our dock friends for a farewell drink! But, we were already leaving a few weeks later than anticipated and we weren't pushing back our departure date for even one more day. So, our dock friends watched while they drank for us! 

We got everything done and were up at sunrise the next morning and ready to go.

On November 18th, we finally left the dock and headed East! It was a beautiful day, and it felt so good to FINALLY be headed somewhere new. We'd been waiting for this day a long time! It's weird, because I always planned about writing about the days leading up to this experience, but we were so busy making it happen that I just didn't have the time. Let me just say ... it was so surreal to actually leave the dock, and so exhilarating! Here's a quick video taken just minutes after leaving the dock ...

 We went through the Rigolets bridge, and then began our journey into unfamiliar territory. We entered the Mississippi Sound and stayed in Gulfport, MS the first night. Our first day was fun, with calm seas and blue skies! 

On the second day, we motored to an anchorage in Pascagoula, and on the 3rd day (my birthday) we awoke to a beautiful sunrise and enjoyed the company of dolphin while drinking coffee in our cockpit. I couldn't capture the dolphin, but there were a lot! It was so peaceful, and I couldn't think of a better way to start my birthday!

After we pulled up the anchor, we passed Dauphin Island and crossed Mobile Bay, which was like glass. We had a perfect day, being often escorted by dolphin and as an added bonus ... the "Blue Angels" were practicing overhead! Ken said he ordered them for my birthday .. LOL! That afternoon, we pulled into Lulu's alongside the ICW to celebrate my 53rd birthday, and the fact that we were now in Alabama .. and exactly 10 years ago we bought Nirvana! It was a birthday that will never be forgotten! The first photo below is just after crossing Mobile Bay and entering the canal of the ICW.

The following day, a water pump that we ordered the day before arrived (already dealing with the unexpected) and Ken was able to replace it without any problems. Luckily, the guy working at the marina gave us a ride to the hardware store and to Wal-Mart .. yes, the boating community is great! After two nights at Lulu's "Homeport Marina", we were on our way to Pensacola.

The passage from Lulu's to Pensacola was pretty interesting. It started down the ICW canal, which had a busy highway to our starboard side for a while. The highway was later replaced with beautiful homes along the way, and the area looked very similar to the canals back home. We then entered an area of really cool sand dunes. Once again, we were escorted by dolphin and treated to another "Blue Angels" show! I tried to capture this on my cheap phone, but just couldn't.

When passing the sand dunes, it was a pretty narrow passage. We were glad to have our chart plotter to stay on course! BTW, our "chart plotter" was an app (Aqua Map) on our iPad, and I'll be writing a post dedicated to it soon because it was so cheap and so easy. I swear, it's so much better than our expensive Lowrance and we love it! Below is a pic of it taken just after leaving Lulu's ...

After running for weeks, we were exhausted when we finally arrived in Pensacola mid-day. We decided to get some rest and dock near Pensacola Beach for a few days. The location was just what we needed! The beach was a short walk away, as well as "Happy Hour" and beautiful sunsets from our cockpit. See that sailboat on the outside dock facing the trawler? That's Nirvana! The very first photo in this post was taken from Nirvana one evening .. we loved the view!

After a few days of exploring the Pensacola Beach area, we moved our boat to a marina along the ICW in Pensacola for the holidays.

You see, we got a late start leaving Louisiana and we didn't beat the cold. Add to that the fact that not only one .. but two of our tenants gave their notice that they were vacating our rentals! For us, it made sense to stay nearby to repair and rent our rentals ourselves instead of paying a small fortune for someone else to do it for us. As much as we want to continue our sailing journey, we don't wanna freeze and we don't want it to cost us thousands of extra dollars when we're on a small budget!

So, we decided to rent a car and take the 3 hour drive back home to visit with family for Thanksgiving. Our daughter and her family were also in town from Colorado! Since Thanksgiving, we got our truck back from my Dad's place and we've been spending time between one of our vacant rentals and our boat in Pensacola. Luckily, our rental has a washer, dryer and refrigerator and the house doesn't require many repairs. We're once again sleeping on an air mattress, which brings back memories of our time in Puerto Rico! 

It's been pretty nice having a "condo" in Pensacola and a house in Louisiana to go back & forth to. In Orange Beach, we went to a fun Christmas parade that threw tons of candy. I liked the candy much better than the beads we get in New Orleans! We've also enjoyed the Christmas lights in downtown Pensacola and Perdido Key, as well as our traditional visit to New Orleans for drinks and tours of some of the well known hotels that are decorated for Christmas. The first photo is the famous Roosevelt Hotel lobby ..

and Fulton Street always has a huge tree and gingerbread display!

This year was our first visit to the Ritz Carlton to see their Christmas display. Their lobby was also beautiful, and they also had a gingerbread display creation of their own!

The best surprise at the Ritz .. free gumbo! It was really good too!

While waiting for warmer weather and our rental to be vacated, we decided to fly to Colorado for Christmas to see our "kids"! We enjoyed a beautiful "White Christmas" and I cried when they dropped us off at the airport. Our lil man will be two years old in less than a month!

We arrived back in Louisiana just in time to celebrate New Year's Eve with friends. Our other rental will be vacant soon, and we're hoping it's not in too bad of shape. The bad thing is that our currently vacant rental hasn't rented yet, but the good thing is that we have a comfortable place to stay during the Winter and while working on our other rental. When life gives us lemons, we make lemonade!

Ken's also picked up a few jobs while in Louisiana .. may as well make money while he can! We'll continue to make the best of our situation and enjoy both Louisiana & Florida. The views from our cockpit in Pensacola are pretty awesome and the sunsets are gorgeous .. I'll get a picture one of these times. Being next to the ICW, we often see dolphin too .. so rare in Louisiana! 

So what's our plans when the weather gets warmer in the Spring? We're not exactly sure. Since our rentals will always need to be dealt with (and a property manager would suck up our budget), we may decide to continue to stay closer to home. There's a ton of exploring to do in the Florida Panhandle, as well as in between there and Louisiana. We'll get it figured out!

Hasta luego .. until then. Mid-Life Cruising!

Sailing Away From The Heat!

Keepin' cool on the water!

We wake up each day making excuses for not tackling our boat projects ... our solar panels need to be installed, our Mantus anchor needs to be mounted, and various other items need to be scratched off our list. Each day the heat sucks away our motivation. Damn, it's hot! 

We got a few things done in August, telling ourselves that we'd knock out the larger projects in September .. ya know, when the weather was cooler. Well, Mother Nature played a joke on us with the hottest September EVER recorded! It's now October, and we're still breaking heat records .. the "feel like" temperature yesterday was 100 degrees. We're not just sitting around, but the weeks are flying by and we're not as productive as we should be. 

It had been a couple of weeks since we sailed, so we figured we'd escape the heat by sailing Nirvana this past Sunday. We need all the practice we can get, and we want to keep barnacles off of our prop too! It'll be so nice when we're in water that's blue and clear .. and that we can scrub Nirvana in.

Lake Pontchartrain is shallow, so it was pretty choppy with winds at least 15 knots. Another project on our list ... add reefing lines. We only let our "deck sweeper" genoa out halfway, as any more caused us to heel more than was efficient .. or comfortable. I don't like our rail in the water! We do have a smaller head sail, which we'll try out soon. Nirvana has so little room aboard that we're not sure where to store our extra head sail. Right now it's in our storage shed. Wondering .. which sail do you think we'll use the most when sailing to the Bahamas from Louisiana .. a 150 genoa or the smaller jib (not sure of size ... maybe 100 or 90)?

You can see in this photo of Ken that we were heeling, but not too much. This is enough for me!

We had a good day on the water, and we didn't sweat. Sailing is a great way to escape the heat! We keep hearing that living at anchor is much more comfortable than living at a marina .. we hope so! It's hot in our slip, and as soon as Nirvana was docked .. we started sweating. We do have a portable a/c unit for now, but it struggles to keep us cool inside, and it doesn't help when we're out on the deck or in our cockpit. We've added this 10x13 waterproof sun shade, which does seem to help keep our interior cooler. It's polyester, is well made .. and I didn't have to sew it! It also provides coverage between our companionway and bimini, so when our companionway hatch is open we don't have to worry if there's a little rain. We'll be finding a place to store this sun shade on our boat when we leave the dock!

When we're not sailing, we look forward to escaping the heat by watching our Saints play football. We either watch the game on our salon's tv, or go to a local bar .. with air conditioning. We're so glad football season is here ...Who Dat!

The local weather forecast says we'll have our first cool front this coming Tuesday .. temps in the 80's! The forecast has us motivated to get working on our list next week. We've gotta get moving further South soon!

Hasta luego .. until then. Mid-Life Cruising!

Nirvana Sails Again!

Since arriving home from Puerto Rico, we finally made Nirvana a full sailboat again. For the first time in over 6 years .. we went sailing with both sails up! When we removed our sails sometime around 2013, we had no idea it would be so long before we raised them again. We did sail with the main sail for the first time almost a year ago, when we tried out our new sail pack & lazy jacks. It was shortly after that when we had our head stay replaced. Since we had to replace the head stay, we went ahead and raised the roller furler drum in order to have a better view looking forward. Again, we had no idea that it would be almost a year before the head sail was raised .. we were distracted by Puerto Rico!

Shortly after installing our auto-pilot, we took Nirvana out for a sail. However, there wasn't much wind and we didn't move a whole lot, but it was sure nice to see both sails up again (see first photos)! A couple of weeks later we decided to sail to the quaint little town of Mandeville and stay overnight. We'd sailed to Mandeville years before, and thought it would be a great way to get re-acquainted with Nirvana. 

Before raising our sails we needed to pass through the Hwy. 11 Bridge, which has been closed for construction for several months. We had tried on two previous occasions to pass through the bridge, but nobody would answer the VHF! We were determined that this 3rd attempt would work, and luckily someone finally answered us this time around. We had to hail the bridge several times, and then wait about 30 minutes for the bridge to be opened .. but we got through! While we finally had them on the radio, we asked if we'd be able to get through again the next day. The dispatcher said that they had to open the bridge upon request, but they had up to 2 hours to do so. With our previous experience trying to hail the dispatcher, we were nervous going through the bridge. What if we couldn't get back through the next day?! Screw it .. we were going through!

Once we passed through the bridge, the wind died and we had to motor to Mandeville. However, the auto-pilot worked great and it was fun to be on the water. 

Mandeville provides a free place to dock for the night, so we tied up for the night and hoped for better wind the next day. 

The Mandeville lakefront is beautiful, with plenty of live oak trees & huge Southern homes. There's also several restaurants and bars within walking distance .. and a playground with a water fountain to cool off in next to the dock. This fountain was just what we needed to get refreshed before walking to a local restaurant for $1 tacos and live music!

The walk along the lakefront was beautiful!

The dock also provides free electricity (thanks to the city of Mandeville), but as luck would have it .. the electricity was out and the city office had just closed for the night when we arrived! It was hot as hell, and we weren't able to plug in our a/c .. ugh! Oh well, it was time to pull out our mosquito nets, open the hatches, run our four 12v fans, and see how our batteries held up!

It took a while to fall asleep in the heat, but we slept pretty well and our batteries were still pretty full. The next morning we had better wind and were able to raise our sails. We were able to sail for half of the trip (about 2 hours) before the wind died. Those two hours were so much fun, and we can't wait to sail again. It truly had been way too long since we sailed Nirvana for any length of time. We're getting our confidence back!

As you can see in the photo below, raising our roller furler drum was a great decision .. we can see ahead of us now!

Here's a close-up of the two new tangs we had fabricated by our boat neighbor. How lucky were we to have him make these for free?! We were very appreciative and made it up to him.

After waiting a while for the wind to pick up, we reluctantly lowered Nirvana's sails and motored the rest of the way back home. We started hailing the bridge dispatcher about 30 minutes before getting close .. no response. As we approached the bridge with no contact, we started getting nervous about getting stuck on the wrong side of the lake. After about 20 minutes of floating near the bridge and trying to get a response, we saw a barge making its way towards the bridge. Hallelujah .. the bridge certainly couldn't ignore the barge! Luckily, we were correct and we were able to follow the barge through the bridge after waiting about an hour. We made it home!

As we approached our slip, it occurred to me that we've pulled Nirvana into our slip several times since that first time in 2017. We're getting better and haven't bumped the dock since then. It's always a good feeling to tie up with no "excitement".

While we look forward to sailing soon, we've got some more projects to tackle .. our solar panels arrived! We're excited to be working with Renogy Solar, and if you order from them use the code: MidLifeCruising to get an extra 5% off (excluding batteries). We'll be writing about our installation and thoughts, so stay tuned!

Hasta luego ... until then. Mid-Life Cruising!