Cruising Season 2007 is OPEN!! :-) When are we leaving?

OK, OK!! I hear you! I know I haven't updated in quite a while and I apologize - I just haven't had any new news to give you. So....here's where we stand right now. We have FINALLY sold Coast Chandlery & Smuggler's Cove, the 'shop' that we needed to sell before leaving. We still have 2 businesses that have not sold, Goin' Places, which is our Electric Boat rental business and Smuggler's Network, the Internet Cafe located inside of Smuggler's Cove. BUT.....we've decided to go ahead and take off for at least one cruising season. Woohoo!! So....we closed down Goin' Places for the winter season, we'll take off and cruise for 4-5 months, then park the boat and come back here, reopen the business, and replenish the cruising kitty while also putting the business up for sale.

Coast Chandlery sold on Sept 1st to Gary and Kathleen McLaughlin, a local couple from Ventura. Gary comes from a background of marine sales, he worked for West Marine, our competitor, for several years. Michael has been working hard to 'pass the torch' successfully to Gary & Kathleen. He's also been busy shutting down Goin' Places, and completing all those little 'boat projects'. The boat is ready - in fact we had a nice fun trip out to the islands a couple weeks ago and everything worked well, nothing broke.

So "What's the Plan" you ask?? We're planning to leave around the end of December - probably just before Christmas. Rene has work commitments until the 14th of December, but would like to spend Christmas in Catalina Island, then New Year's in San Diego, jumping off to Mexico just past New Year. That's the plan so far.

We're pulling the boat out of the water in November - around the week of the 9th. We'll be out of the water for about a week where we'll do the following:

1. Clean & Paint the bottom
2. Pull the masts. Michael and Chad are checking, cleaning & applying loc-tite to the threads of the norseman fittings, replacing some of the incandescent bulbs with LED's, putting a new SSB antanae, adding new radar reflectors, cleaning and waxing the sticks,
3. Replacing the current 3 blade propellor with a 3 blade feathering MaxProp, which will hopefully help us significantly in steering the boat in reverse.
4. Replace a transducer on the Furuno fishfinder which controls the depth & speed.
5. Re-do the Lazy Jack system, & mark & cut all of the lines.

That's the plan for now....I'll update you when anything changes. In the meantime, we'll be updating the site, I have a new and exciting look that I want to play so keep tuned!!

Thanks for checking in with us....
Rene & Michael