Nan's Idea - Our Liveaboard Adventure

Well, here we are. Today is the end of our 5th week in the boatyard, and we just celebrated Thanksgiving & my birthday yesterday. What an interesting day, spending a holiday in a boatyard, with people you just met a few weeks ago and a few you just met today.   "The Hut" in the boatyard, where we had our Thanksgiving, next to the channel.     As I mentioned in an earlier post, a lot of people  come down from up north and haul their boat out of storage here to cruise during the winter months. These people are called "snowbirds". I had heard of snowboards coming to vacation homes in the south for winter, but never knew about the group that do the same thing on their boat. A lot of the snowbirds here have been around for 10 years or more. I would call them "Boatyard Ratz" (LOL), at least for the holiday season. I laugh at that because those of you that know Tom & I personally, know our group of friends back home call ourselves t...

       This boatyard is amazing! Charlotte Harbor Boat Storage  is a premier dry boat storage and do-it-yourself boatyard in SW Florida. They take extremely good care of your boat when transporting it in and out of the water. And it is safe and secure when you store it in their gated boatyard. They are located in a protected canal system off the west side of Charlotte Harbor mid-state off the Gulf of Mexico. Here are a couple of videos, one taken while standing on our boat, and another of our boat being put in the water when we did our sea trial.         Since we're living "on the hard", meaning the boat's up on stilts and we can live onboard while it's here in the yard, we are having to adjust to what we can and can't use on the boat. Electricity is not ran like regular shore power at a marina. Every few storage bays have a 110v plug for an extension cord to your boat. This runs lights, fan, TV, ...

When we bought our 40' Heritage East early October, it was stored in a boatyard on the west coast of Florida. While the owners stayed onboard her for a few days to get their personal items off of her, Tom and I headed back to Texas to get our things from storage. We didn't have much left after we sold or donated the majority of our belongings, but we did keep a few things like kitchenware, pictures, and a few more personal items which all fit in a 5x5 storage area. We stayed in Texas a little over a week to enjoy some family birthdays and relax before another long trek driving back to Florida. Instead of renting a UHaul, a friend offered to drive our things to us, using his long enclosed trailer. We took him up on it, since paying him would be easier on us than driving a UHaul ourselves. On our way back to Florida, we stopped in Pensacola in Florida's panhandle, so we could spend some time at the beach. The whole time we were looking at boats in Florida, we did not go ...

We arrive in Sebastian, FL on Mon Sep 25th, and started looking at boats the next day.  Over the next 4 days we drove over 1,000 miles from Fort Lauderdale to Cocoa Beach, with no luck of finding what we wanted or what we could afford. After exhausting all the boats on the east coast of Florida, I decided to post a question about our search on Facebook. On both the Live Aboard Boats page and the Trawler Living & Cruising page, I told them what type of boat we were looking for and asked if anyone has a boat for sale to give me the sales link online or PM me the information. One nice gentleman PM'd me that he had a 40' Heritage East trawler for sale and was asking $40K for it. Way under our budget! I responded and asked if he had any pictures and where it was located. It's located on the west coast of Florida, in a boat yard in Placeda which is north of the Fort Myers area. I told him my husband would be calling him. The picture of the boat that the owners sent us. ...