Why couldn't we have been raised to live on a boat? I mean c'mon Dad you were the one who showed me your passions for surfing, boating and everything else related to water, didn't you foresee this coming? We really could've used the foresight and background of having lived aboard previously throughout this process to know where to begin. But therein lies a victory, albeit a small one but nonetheless a victory for us, just to begin.
To say we envisioned ourselves being overwhelmed and having an exploding to do list chock-full of daunting hand scribed only documents and DMV visits, would be a lie. As with most when they are infatuating over their dream, we only saw the romantic side of it all. Yes, we are overwhelmed, or at least we were, but this is exactly where we wanted to be. Only difference was we had a different, nay sexier term for it when we were planning out our adventure, being outside of our comfort zone.
A quote from one of the greatest modern day adventurers.
So here we are now as a fully insured, USCG documented, antique registered sailing vessel and an incredibly relieved pair of not-so-green anymore owners. Don't get me wrong we still don't have the slightest clue of where to begin on properly tacking, bleeding a fuel line or what amps we draw but man can we tie a mean bowline and furl the shit out of that headsail. Oh yeah by the way Lucidity is now in her home port of St. Petersburg after her maiden voyage from middle of nowhere Florida, I mean Indiantown but we'll dive more into that in the next post.
So where to start on the documentation process? I'd prefer to not relive it so how about the cliff notes version - you'll thank me later. So why USCG documentation? Well first off we liked the idea of not having to smear some random combination of Home Depot purchased letter & number decals on the front steps (port bow section of hull) of our home.
Mermaid added for flavor.
Secondly, being documented facilitates clearance with foreign governments when cruising their waters and provides certain protections while sailing under Old Glory. As for antique registration, easy answer is its crazy cheap. Cheap as in $5.25 per year. Lastly insurance, yea I saved the most exhilarating for last. We decided on going with hull insurance and 300k liability, due primarily to our lack of sailboating experience. What hull insurance does is provide pay out if you were to lose your boat to a hurricane, fire, what have you. They pay out what you have stated as an Agreed Value or Market Value, which for us sounded like a great way to be screwed out of what our vessel is truly worth due to the insurance industry's best friend, depreciation. Needless to say we decided on Agreed Value, paid for the full year and got unlimited towing as well.
That face looks familiar to me as well when dealing with insurance, Flo.
Relieved is a subtle way of describing how I feel now that it's all done. We're legal, we're still afloat and we can somewhat back our boat out of its tight slip, lookout world. We are learning something new everyday, being challenged in more ways than we could've imagined and enduring the feeling of going from almost-experts at our current jobs to complete sailing novices. This is what we signed up for, we're happily overwhelmed and stoked to have you here for the duration of staying outside our comfort zones.