Snow­poca­lypse put a real dent in my clean­ing and declut­ter­ing process. I know it seems like being snowed in for two weeks would have been a boon to that process, but not so much. The effort of car­ing for the refuge and the exhaus­tion took its toll. Plus the area around the dump­ster is still cov­ered in snow so toss­ing stuff our wasn’t pos­si­ble. So I real­ly need to get a move on. Espe­cial­ly since I start­ed boat shop­ping today. There wasn’t any­thing that real­ly drew me today, though I did send an email for a tar­tan project boat.

I don’t real­ly want a project boat, but tar­tans are great boats. It is is in Mary­land and on land and only like $1000. I am guess­ing there isn’t an engine since it is so cheap, but I sent off am email to check any­way. There were two oth­er boats a Cal 27 and a Pear­son 30 that would also be pos­si­ble, but I held off con­tact­ing the own­ers of those because there have been times that I’ve seen boats that real­ly called to me and nei­ther of those do. Hav­ing said that if noth­ing that real­ly calls to me comes out in the next month I may go ahead and con­tact them about those boats. (Assum­ing they are still available.)

I am going to work on a spell to attract the per­fect boat for me, but haven’t even start­ed work on that yet. One of the boats that I looked at already had a solar pan­el, but was more than I want­ed to spend right now. All though depend­ing on the wattage on the pan­el it would be worth look­ing into. I guess the first step will be to decide what I real­ly want in a boat:
•    Safe and seaworthy
•    Sails in good condition
•    Work­ing engine
•    Large enough to be liveable
•    Galley
•    Roomy cockpit
In addi­tion to these things are the oth­er things that if it doesn’t have I can add
•    Solar pow­er and bat­tery bank
•    Sol­id, reli­able ground tackle
•    Com­fy sleep­ing arrangement
• Oven
•    Fridge (Engle would be great.)
•    Bimini
•    Open­ing ports
•    Water maker
Most of these won’t be on the boat right away. Actu­al­ly the only two things on the sec­ond list that are nec­es­sary are the solar pow­er and the ground tack­le.  The non-nec­es­sary stuff will be re-eval­u­at­ed after I’m liv­ing aboard and have a bet­ter idea of what I real­ly need to sur­vive. For instance open­ing ports and fans might be more impor­tant to me in the sum­mers of Key West than a water mak­er if I can set up a Bimi­ni for water col­lec­tion dur­ing the near dai­ly down­pours. So it is time to kick it in to gear.