The Next Chapter, otherwise Known as The Sailing Life

 Now that we had our boat, we had to prepare
her for an ocean crossing.  Gary moved aboard shortly after purchase in November of 2018, and I joined him for a few days in January, 2019, following our Christmas back in the US.  This is what we saw out our bedroom portlight when we woke up that first morning.  In SOUTHERN Italy!  The place came to a standstill.

 

We were staying in the water at the Dadarrio Boatyard. Michaela, our broker, continued to help us navigate our way through not only life as sailboat owners, but also helped us navigate our way through the Italian culture.  She called to let us know that everything was shut down due to the snow.  We asked how often Southern Italy gets snow- she told us only once every 3-4 years.  Guess we were just lucky....or not?!

Did I mention that the boat has no heat? Fortunately, the previous owner had left a small space heater for us, and Gary had purchased a comforter for our bed, and we had brought a heavy denim quilt with us that Gary’s mom made, so we didn’t exactly freeze.

Gary got around by renting cars from Rome for 30 Euros a week.  Unfortunately, every 2 weeks, they required him to drive back to Rome and “re-rent” the car for another 2 weeks. This took 10 hours, round trip.   Eventually, we figured out he could fly into Brindisi instead of Rome, and rent the car from there for the same amount from a much nicer rental car business.  Gary tells me I should write a separate blog post about all his rental car experiences in Italy!

The plan was for Gary to spend January through June working on the boat, flying back to Egypt once a month or so to see me and “reset” his Visa.  Everything about that last sentence turned out to be naive and wrong!  More on that later.

Gary’s quite mechanical.  He once tore our house furnace apart.  I mean, completely apart.  I arrived home from work, opened the garage door, and found our garage full of tables filled with hundreds of little pieces of our furnace!  I didn’t know they had so many parts.  He put it back together and it worked better than ever.

I tell you this so you understand what a surprise it was to hear that Gary struggled to get anything done on the boat. Here he is in the engine room learning about the diesel engine, the filters, the water intakes to cool the engine, and all of the other systems that are in there that I know nothing about...

In the USA, you search websites for what you need to buy, find the place with the best price, order it, and it gets shipped to you, right?  Not the case in Italy.  Gary planned to do the ordering and installing himself.  Here is the only thing he was able to order and install himself.

Yes, the two television sets!  He bought them at a mall. But, anything boat related was impossible to find or buy online!  He was getting so frustrated.  Michaela and a guy at the boatyard kept asking him if he needed anything.  In our American minds, we figured that they would tack on a profit if we asked them to get us anything, and they would then want to install it, too.  But, Gary eventually gave up trying to order a generator, and he knew he needed that professionally installed...so, using Google translate, he got it ordered through the boatyard.  Much to our surprise, the boatyard SUBTRACTED money from the bill.  Since we weren’t EU citizens, they were able to subtract the VAT tax for us.  They also gave us additional discounts for having the work done by them. It worked out to be cheaper to have them order everything we needed than to try to buy things on our own.  Unfortunately, it took us over a month and a half of precious time before we figured this out!

We had a list of things we wanted to get done. Gary prioritized all things having to do with entertainment televisions first, then things for SCUBA diving- the generator and compressor. I prioritized practical things like solar power and a water maker and learning about the electronics for navigation.  I was still working full-time in Egypt, so in June when we pulled away from the dock for the first time, we were ready to SCUBA, but we couldn’t read our navigation charts to know where we were going!

Fortunately, we had two really smart crew members join us for our first three weeks who were better at figuring out the electronic navigation equipment.   More about our first crew in the next blog...

Is this larger font easier to read?  Do you like the larger photos, or does it slow down the loading of the blog?  When I wrote this blog, I chose the large font for the whole thing, but when I look at the blog after it is published, the font appears to be all different sizes.  I have no idea why. Does it look that way on your device?  Any feedback or advice is appreciated!