Koku will enjoy being aboard Astraea because he'll get extra room to lounge around. He's not coming on this trip though.
Friday I spoke with Tom, the broker at Noyce Yachts. The payment from the bank has cleared, so Astraea is now officially ours! I began whirlwind preparations last week, starting with finding a boat shipper on uShip. I spent time this week adding a few more coats of varnish to Airborne in preparation to sell. Only four coats down and she really looks nice!
Eight man hours of work to get the varnish looking this nice. That includes scraping, sanding and 4 coats of varnish.
Here’s the plan for getting Astraea to San Diego:
Early next week Scooter, the yard manager, will put Astraea in the water, remove the masts and store them ashore.
We bought round trip plane tickets on Priceline.com for $152 each! We leave San Diego Thursday morning and arrive at Baltimore Washington International Airport at 4:45 in the afternoon. We’ll visit Karl and Nicole (Natalie’s sister) that night and head down to Galesville, MD to see Astraea for the first time Friday morning. My Mom and Dad will drive down to help prepare the boat for shipping. Friday I plan to blow up the dinghy, attach the engine and run around the harbor. Then we’ll remove and label the rigging and store it in boxes so nothing damages the inside of the boat during shipping. I’d also like to test the oven by making frozen pizza. I want to operate everything onboard, except the engine and toilet since they’ve been winterized. We’ll spend the night aboard with Mom and Dad, but if they snore too loud someone’s going to sleep in a hotel.
Saturday and Sunday we’ll take photos of everything in the storage units and pack the boat for shipping. We’ll spend the night in a hotel because I suspect the boat will get full of stuff quickly.
We’ll be shipping Astraea with help from Mark Frazier of WT Inc from Sealy, Texas. The truck will arrive when the yard opens on Monday February 13 to pick Astraea up for shipping. That evening we’ll fly out of Baltimore and be back aboard Airborne by midnight.
In other news…
Today, when Natalie and I were walking up to the boater’s lounge, Natalie saw a lot of bird poo on the finger by the abandoned boat on 600 dock. At the top was an osprey with a fresh fish in its talons.
Fresh fish, anyone?
An osprey made its temporary home atop the mast of the abandoned boat. It looks like the boat has a good outboard engine on the back, and we haven’t seen anyone around it since we moved in.
The abandoned boat, chained to the dock.