Wow! It has been an eventful few weeks since our last post:

• We traveled to Fort Lauderdale for the survey and sea trial
• We traveled to Galax, VA for a weekend with family “cabin’ing”
• We traveled to Annapolis, MD for the US Sailboat Show
• We closed on our new boat

We traveled to Fort Lauderdale for the survey and sea trial

We flew down to Fort Lauderdale on Sept 25th and after checking into our hotel we visited some marinas in order to locate a slip to keep Aventis for the next year.  Some marinas don’t have the space for catamarans, some won’t really know if they have a slip until after the Fort Lauderdale boat show the first week of November, and some want as much as $3,000 per month! After our first day of scoping marinas out, we were a little worried that we might not find one in the Lauderdale area.

On Sept 26th we got up early and were at the boat by 8am. With a hired captain, the surveyor, the seller’s broker, and our broker we checked out every inch of the boat for the next 8 hours.

After some inspections for about an hour, we motored down the intercoastal to the marina where we would haul the boat out to survey the hulls. On our way, we also raised the sails.

The survey went great. The surveyor found about a dozen things that need to be fixed. They assure us this is a whole lot less than normal since the boat is practically new. The good news is that everything on the list is going to be fixed for us!

After the survey we went to the marina office where the boat is currently docked and we signed up for another year. The marina is in a gated community with 24/7 security, nice facilities for restrooms, showers, laundry, etc and we get to use the community pool and gym. The rent can’t be beat either! The marina is actually in Hollywood, Florida (about 5 miles south of Fort Lauderdale). Hollywood is mainly a resort community, which means lots of good shopping and restaurants for us. So, in one long but fun day we learned a lot about the boat, that the few things wrong are going to be fixed, and where we are going to live on the boat for the next year. Well, we aren’t actually moving aboard full time until June, but we will visit a lot.

The next day we jumped on a flight back to Charlotte. Bye boat and Florida!

We traveled to Galax, VA for a weekend with family cabin’ing

When we arrived in Charlotte we met my sister Jenny aka Skylar at the airport and brought her back to Blowing Rock with us. The next day we cooked and packed and drove up to Galax, Virginia to meet up with my mom, Jack, Shawn (my brother), Miki (sister-in-law), their boys Lucas and Theo, and of course Jenny/Skylar, Ella, and Addie. Makenzie couldn’t join us because she was in the middle of sorority stuff (she is a new member of Sigma Kappa at App State). We rented 3 cabins and celebrated my mom’s 70th birthday. Other exciting news we learned while “cabin’ing” is that my sister got married to a nice (so I hear) guy named Dave Wilkinson and changed her name to Mikaela Wilkenson. For now they are staying out in Fort Collins, CO as a happy newlywed couple. Pretty exciting stuff!

We traveled to Annapolis, Md for the US Sailboat Show

We returned from “cabin’ing” on Sunday and then on Wednesday morning we took off to Annapolis to go to the US Sailboat Show. This was our first time in Annapolis – what a neat, historic city by the water! Since we now (almost) have a boat, being at the show was different for us from our past shows. We toured a bunch of catamarans and even a monohull. Our decision to get the Lagoon 450 was definitely reaffirmed! We also price shopped for equipment and supplies we want to add to the boat. We didn’t buy much (more than we meant to actually) because we are going to wait for the Lauderdale show and/or Miami show to actually get everything since we will be so close to our boat then. The best part of the show was meeting other cruisers and soon-to-be cruisers.  We met the broker selling our boat there. He is also going to be our neighbor at the marina. He lives aboard the same kind of boat and conducts sailing and boat buying seminars as Catamaranguru.com. Having someone so knowledgeable about our model so close by is awesome for us. While in Annapolis we also went to a party at Leopard/Moorings hosted by Happy Together, a cruising couple we watch on Youtube.  One day we also met one of the owners of Just Catamarans (Jim, our broker works for Just Cats and we will definitely have Just Cats add some equipment and do some modifications/maintenance for us). Interestingly, the owner we met, Kent, moved up to the Blowing Rock area full time just last month!

Well, we toured, shopped, ate, drank, and talked for four days and flew back home. We thought we would close on the boat while in Annapolis, but the paperwork didn’t get finished in time.

We closed on our new boat!

After being home a couple of days from Annapolis (the first day back was Columbus day so nothing was happening that day) we finally closed on our boat! We are now the proud owners of Aventis. 🙂

Aventis is currently getting everything on the survey list fixed. We hope to go down for our first visit as owners (to clean and perform the renaming ceremony) next week. We will let you know in our next update…