We spent the entire month of November 2024 organizing, making improvements, focusing on repairs, and other needed preparations.
Jason spent several months before moving onto the boat working with a company that specializes in DC electrical systems in RVs to design a solution on our boat that would allow us to swap out the AGM batteries for Lithium (or LiFePO4) batteries, and we spent the majority of our time working on that install. The amount of old and seemingly random wire we pulled out was impressive, and we removed many pounds of heavy AGM batteries (that we took to a local battery shop for recycling). Jason really did a thorough and thoughtful job on this project.
There was also some plumbing work that needed to be done…once upon a time, I had no idea what a joker valve was, and then one day, I was changing one out (ick).
We also spent some time working with a local graphics shop to get our boat name made up on a decal. Our friend Danny put together a really cool logo for us before we had even bought the boat, and we were able to utilize that for the decals…we also had the boat name and our port of call done up in a matching font.
All of the clutches at our helm that routes and controls our running rigging had labels that were fading, so I pulled out my label maker and redid all the labels so we would know what line controlled what part of the sails (there are more than what is shown below).
We also had a local captain come on board to help teach us how to move the boat around in close spaces using the engines. Originally I was going to be the official captain onboard, since I had some training, but I quickly exhibited that I was not at all adept at controlling the boat. Jason picked it up very well, so we decided that it would be best for him to be captain.
One of our final tasks before leaving the dock was to take the Jeep to our friends’ place in FL to store it. So we took off the afternoon of November 29 to make a long drive to Eastlake, FL where we would leave the Jeep until we needed it again (and after using it all this past summer, we returned it to this same spot April 2026).
We ultimately left Brunswick Landing on December 1…we still had questions on some of the systems, not knowing whether they would work or not, but one of the traps many boaters get into is that they want everything “perfect” before leaving the dock, and things are never perfect on a boat.