The Details.

You have questions? (Wow, so do we…) But here are some answers for the easy ones.

BOAT? It’s a Catalina 34. It’s on the smaller side of what we were looking for, but it checked the boxes that we needed checked with its two staterooms, U-shaped dining space and roomy cockpit. Added bonuses are its hard-bottomed dinghy and outboard, solar panels, generator, and some pretty sweet plastic plates with daisies AND stripes.

NAME? Her name is currently Migration, but we will soon christen her Chickadee, to bring juuuust a bit more ‘Maine’ with us. Violet has a ‘pet’ chickadee that visits the bird feeder at her Montessori school every day who she’s named Stormy, so we went for the general instead of the specific, for fear of bad weather omens. (Truth be told, I was lobbying for the boat to be called Lilypad with The Shrinking Violet as the tender, but I fully grasped Andy’s inequity argument. Chickadee lives!)

WHERE? AND THEN WHERE? ‘Migratadee’ is currently in Indiantown, Florida, on the Okachobee waterway about 25 miles inland of Stuart. Our plan is to leave MDI on January 29, 2016 and drive to Florida as quickly as possible (it depends on how many hours straight we can push Andy to stay awake, as I’ll be happily sleeping for as many hours as I can!). From there we’ll hope that the contents of the car fit into the boat, add a few thousand other odds and ends, finish a few projects, and take off. The plan is to ‘hop’ over to the Abacos for the majority of our time, but our number one goal is to have fun and hook the girls on cruising, and if that means not finding a nearly perfect weather window to cross, than we’ll be just as happy cruising the Keys. Or 99% as happy anyway.

Wherever we end up, we’ll make our way back to Indiantown to haul out when we’re through at the end of March, button the old bird up (see what I did there with our new name?!) and drive home to the frozen, muddy tundra that is Maine in April. We’ll then spend the next ten months waiting for our next escape.

For now, however, this ‘To Take’ pile is growing as quickly as our lists are, so it’s time to shape some mattress pads.