Search by tags Boat Makes Three
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Boat Makes Four?
More than a year after buying Annabel Lee, our lives are still in a constant state of change. We're moving forward with buying a house in St. Augustine, which is huge for me – I only started living on land a few years ago, and wasn't sure how ... -
The Mast Rises Again
With a few weekends of work and several hundred dollars invested in Annabel Lee’s rigging, it was time to put the mast back up. But with our trailer still busted, we couldn’t pull her out of the water and do things the normal way. We’d have to try ... -
High Maintenance
The house we’re renting in St. Augustine is kind of creepy – creepy in the way that you can imagine all kinds of strange things having gone on there in the past. Since we’ve been there, we’ve had several odd occurrences happen (blank pieces of paper ... -
Puzzle Pieces
As we limped back to the marina, our mast perched across the deck and sails crumpled around it, the whole thing lashed to the boat with various bungee cords, I felt my heart sinking into my belly. All the work that we’d put into Annabel Lee, all the ... -
Wounded
For a few minutes, there was nothing I could do but crouch on the bow of the boat, and stare with utter shock at the scene before me. The mast was lying at an odd angle on top of the cabin. The sails were all crumpled on the deck and hanging into the water. ... -
Without A Mast
Things between us and Annabel Lee couldn’t have been going better. She was permanently in the water, and it looked good on her. Will and I would walk down to the dock at Camachee Cove marina to see her sitting peacefully in her corner, ready to go ... -
Sailing Downwind
Getting up on a Saturday morning and being able to head down to the boat and simply go sailing is a novel thing. It’s so different from what we had gotten used to in Fort Lauderdale, where going sailing involved hooking up the trailer, fighting off crowds ... -
A Family Tradition
With Annabel Lee finally in the water, tucked away in a corner of Camachee Cove Yacht Harbor, it was easy to forget that we now had an unusable trailer. After all, we planned on keeping her in the water for a long time. The trailer went back to the ... -
Trailer Trouble
As Will (along with Casey and Wes, the super-star crew from Camachee Cove Yacht Harbor) crouched underneath Annabel Lee’s trailer and tried to figure out exactly what had happened, my dad and I jumped in the Honda and drove around to the other side of ... -
Failure to Launch
It was Easter Sunday and Annabel Lee looked her best, donned in a fresh coat of bottom paint and polished to perfection. And my hair was looking better too, as I had found a salon whose expert stylists managed to get the blue bottom paint out of my ... -
Painting More Than the Boat
Back in St. Augustine, Spring was finally beginning to show. It was a new thing for me – the concept of flowers blooming and new leaves growing on the trees, the concept of an actual season. I was so excited about it that I even went out and had ... -
Lessons Learned
Other people’s boats are great, but they are susceptible to the same kinds of problems as your own. And the bigger the boat, the bigger the problem. This is something that I repeatedly explain to Will each time he starts talking about maybe getting a ... -
Frostbite Racing
There’s nothing quite like sailing on other peoples’ boats, especially when your own is sitting in hibernation beneath a layer of frost and dead leaves. As Annabel Lee rested, saving her energy up for Spring, Will and I fought the feeling that we ... -
Movin' on Up
We had never seen ourselves living in South Florida permanently. For one thing, sailing in Fort Lauderdale was kind of a pain. Marinas were too expensive (dockage had tripled during the five years that I lived aboard my 28’ sailboat in North Miami, due to ... -
Moving Annabel Lee
The first time I drove the 4Runner with Annabel Lee in tow was the five-hour drive from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, up to our new home in St. Augustine. We hadn’t had the boat in the water since August, and it was a mid-November morning, hot enough in ... -
Learning to Let Go
The day was almost perfect. The only thing keeping it from being completely perfect was a small navigational miscalculation (on Will's part) toward the end of the day, challenging us to figure out exactly where we were with only our vision and the ... -
Zen, At Last
Leaving Boot Key Harbor, we were both starting to feel sad that this was the last full day of our cruise. Will snapped photos while I maneuvered the boat out the narrow channel toward the Seven Mile Bridge. I felt a little more comfortable than I had ... -
A View of Boot Key Harbor
We had the first good night of sleep aboard the boat that night. It was probably because a.) we were in a marina, where we didn't have to worry about the anchor dragging in a thunderstorm, and b.) we ran the little cabin fan all night because we weren't ... -
Marina Love
Join us each week as we follow Melanie and Will and their quest for freedom on the high seas in Boat Makes Three...
Civilization can be a beautiful thing. When you’ve spent three days and two nights ... -
Docking for Beginners
Join us each week as we follow Melanie and Will and their quest for freedom on the high seas in Boat Makes Three...
After the second night in a row of not getting any sleep, Will and I began the next leg of our Keys adventure with a short ...
