In October, 2018, I sold my townhouse in Victoria, BC. Townhouses in "good" neighbourhoods go for ridiculous prices so I was able to put half the proceeds into our new home, with plenty left over:
Nawitka is a 1996 Beneteau Oceanis 400 - a 40' sloop. She is roomy and quite lovely inside, with lots of warm wood, comfy seats, a nice galley, and all the comforts of home, in 1/10 the space. Or less.
People ask me why I wanted to move onto a boat, and there are multiple reasons. First and foremost, I love sailing, and I love being on the water. Genetic engineering to give me gills isn't yet practical and I sort of like cooked food, so a boat is as close as I'm going to get to living *in* the ocean.
Secondly, I LOVE living in small spaces. I love the simplicity of it, I love the challenges of making do, I like not being able to spend money on stuff, I like having to Marie Kondo my stuff all the time, I like knowing where everything is. (Full disclosure: I don't know where my knife sharpener is right now, and it's driving me crazy.) I love that I can thoroughly clean the whole cabin in about an hour and a half. I love the way I get rocked to sleep every night. I love the marina community. I love my view. I love the way the air smells when I open a port light or the main hatch in the morning. I love that I can take my home with me on vacation, and it can be ready to go in less than an hour. I love that I can take my home crabbing, or fishing, or just wake up on a sunny day and say "hey kids let's go for a sail" and they literally stash their stuff, throw on their PFDs, and we're good to go.
A short story to illustrate: when this move was still in the planning stages, my son (who is 5) told an old family friend that "mummy's going to buy a sailboat and we're going to live on it" and they laughed and said "Oh yeah we've only been hearing THAT for 20 years."
This has been a long time coming. Many years ago, during my first marriage, my then-husband and I lived aboard his parents' sailboat for a semester or so while we went to school. I loved it. The boat was cramped (27') and built for racing. Condensation was a problem. We had no water tank. The head was located under the berth. We had a non-gimballed propane 2-burner camp stove. And to make it all more fun, we weren't at a dock, we were "on the hook" as they say. In Cadboro Bay. And not the nice sheltered part behind the yacht club - we had a 6' draft, so we were out in the part that got the southeasterlies full-on. We had to move off the boat because we nearly missed more than one exam as the waves were too big to safely get off the boat into the dinghy, and the dinghy wasn't safe to take to shore. But I loved it. I loved the motion of it, the maintenance rituals, the coziness. And ever since then, I've wanted to live aboard again, but this time, to do it right.
So now I have the closest thing to a luxury yacht that I could stomach. To be honest, I would have liked something smaller and more simple. But, I have two children who need to be comfortable and happy, and they did have a say in the form of our new home. We all liked Nawitka the moment we saw her, and while she wasn't entirely problem-free, she was a more-than-acceptable compromise.
She's quite a novel experience for us, though.
She is twice the length of my first sailboat:
Well, technically the Wren is not my first sailboat - I previously co-owned a 22' MacGregor (and lived aboard that 27' racing sloop)... but the Wren was my first all-mine sailboat. When I bought Nawitka, I'd had the Wren for a couple years and was getting fairly comfortable single-handing her. Wren has no electronics, no winches, no lifelines, no wheel - she is a beautifully unencumbered, pure sailing vessel. (And don't worry, I'm keeping her! She is not a thing to be dumped when a new thing comes along. Part of why I wanted to live aboard a sailboat was so that I (and all my tools) would be close to the Wren and I can work on her more easily. She needs a LOT of work. That hasn't quite happened yet, but to be fair, it's, like, -10C and there's snow on the dock and I have no way of heating the Wren plus a head full of cold viruses, so although I *finally* have time, the universe had other plans. Like a blog, it seems...)
Nawitka, on the other hand, is a house that sails, and getting used to her has been a process - one that is very much still under way. There's the sailing part and the living part. There are some factors keeping those two parts separate for now: work, our inexperience, the kids' school, and the weather. So, I'll document the sailing and the living separately.
For this first entry, because the saily people want to know these things, I'll just go over how Nawitka is kitted out:
Furling main & jib (more on that later)
45 HP Yanmar diesel engine
3-cabin layout (so necessary with 2 kids, aged 13 and 5)
All the mod cons: fridge (way too big), 3-burner Force 10 stove with oven, double sink, pressurized hot & cold water
2 heads (more on that in a later post)
6'4" headroom (yeah like I need that, laughs everyone who knows me)
oodles of storage
colour GPS chartplotter thingy (more on that later)
VHF radio
12v DC/110v AC systems (no inverter)
big ass fuel tank
2 big ass water tanks (550L combined - but more on that later)
Espar diesel furnace (more on that too)
Everything with (more on that later) was a problem in some fashion. But who writes a blog where just lovely things happen? Sit back, relax, and be entertained by my problems. Spoiler alert: I solved most of them. But only most.
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