One week after Moving Aboard Brick House (11+ years ago!)

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FLASHBACK!

We are married now and living aboard!

13 July 2007 | Sakonnet Brewers Marina
Rebecca Childress

Sorry I havent written for a while…a lot has been happening!

Patrick and I got married on the 4th of July. Everything went just the way we planned it, and it was a beautifull memorable day in every way…From walking down the aisle (dock) with my dad, to stopping the progression to have my picture taken with dad by Ian- Patricks brother in law that managed to make it to the wedding despite a death in his family, to almost losing my vail every 60 seconds… Patrick was an unbelievable groom holding my hands through much of the ceremony, and shedding a tear or two during our vows! He made the most eloquent, complimentary toast after the wedding that I will remember forover. Married on the front of the bow, Patrick and I will celebrate every 4th of July for a while, wherever we are in the world, right where we got married- on the bow of our Brick House! The fireworks at the end of the evening on a neighboring tour boat – The Gansett, a beautiful boat from Maine, were fantastic – we were up very close, and despite the pouring rain, we were comfortable, dry , well fed and well lubricated!!It was truly a wonderful day!

Two days after the wedding, we had to prepare our house for our tenants, and for our move on to Brick House.

A couple of thoughts about the process so far ( We have been officially onboard now for 3 days and 2 nights…this being our 3rd.)

1. We are ALWAYS in eachothers way- it takes repacing oneself to just wait for the person to finish what they are doing so you can pass by them. It seems to take Patrick less getting used to than me…maybe he just has more patience. I LOVE being with him all the time and having him so close to me, but it does get annoying to always have to stop dead in my tracks to wait for him to move!! I suppose I will either get used to that, or get more aggravated by it!

2.The refrigeration is COMPLETELY broken now…Once in a while we buy something cold and a package of icecubes, but for the most part we are just eating things that either don’t have to be refridgerated, or are taking chances with things that are SUPPOSE to be refridgerated but arent. For example…I have discovered today that MILK will help with constipation if left out of the refridgrator for 24 hours.. Not enough to make you sick, just enough to be medicinal!

3.The stove/oven is somewhat on its last legs…We are down to just 2 working burners. We havent tried the oven yet, but assume that it works. We are trying to find a deeply discounted one, or slightly used one to replace the old one with, since most of the parts arent made for that stove any more.

4.The fresh water – well both tanks had more wildlife in them than water. We think one tank is leaking although we arent sure if it’s a tank, a fitting or a hose yet. The baffle ( a wall diving the tank in half so large amounts of water don’t wildly move from side to side while in waves) was completely broken in one of the tanks. This was allowing the huge amount of water in the tank, along with the huge metal baffled to slosh around the tank…Always wondered what that loud crashing noise coming from that tank was all about…We have found a paint to put inside the tanks to hopefully buy some more life from the tanks. We know sister-ships who have since replaced their water tanks – so we know we are on borrowed time with these 30+ year old tanks. So the tanks are clean at least now…but we still have to find out if the glue we used (3M 5200) to put the baffle backtogether will always be a source of poison for us to drink or not. Someone says it has arsenic in it to help it cure…

5.I have WAY to many clothes, and we have way too many books. The next several weeks will be spent further paring things down, in addition to getting the boat ready to depart! Patrick has about 6 tshirts, 3 of which he says he will throw out when they get dirty. I must have 50 t-shirts…so far I’ve been able to part with 3 of them.

6.We have a nice boat! Despite many systems still needing TLC I look around our boat and are so pleased with the progress since the boat came out of the water 3 years ago. She is our home, and both of us have spent hours lounging at night, beaming about how nice our home is coming along!

We are happy to be aboard, and feel so fortunate to be with another person that is as equally excited about this whole thing11…We can’t believe we found eachother, and that our whole adventure has begun!! 6-8 more weeks at the dock, and then we cut the cords, and take off!!

We hope you will follow our adventures on this web site! I will try to update it a little sooner next time!!! Stay tuned!

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7 Valuable Sailing Tips for a Long Range Cruiser

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Patrick Childress has put another great video together. He talks about how to prevent water from coming in the hawespipe, the portlights, the hatches, as well as how to better hand your lines, books to have onboard, and two others I can’t remember right now that can help beginner and experienced cruisers alike. Be sure to subscribe to his channel and give a thumbs up to it too…

Click Here for “7 Valuable Sailing Tips for a Long Range Cruiser”

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Approaching another land of Animals in Tanzania…reminiscing about Borneo Malaysia!

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Borneo…3 years ago this month…so excited to be approaching another land of animals in Africa! We will spend a year in East Africa,so we will hopefully be able to take many photos! 

Borneo. The name has that wild air to it; pigmy head hunters, wild men, jungles. I googled “wild man of Borneo”, terms I remember from movies my parents and grandparents had watched. Actually there were two wild men from Borneo, but in reality they were two dwarfs from Massachusetts that a carnival promoter had dressed up in furs and primeval garb, waving long spears. But who would ever catch on; who has ever been to Borneo, especially in our grandparents day?
Indonesia, on the east, and Malaysia, on the west, share the island of Borneo. From either country, you can venture inland or up narrow tributaries to marshes full of large crocodiles, exotic proboscis monkeys, the parochial orangutan, bearded wild boar and all sorts of other unique animals. Fortunately the natives are friendly. Conveniently, the language in Malaysia is as similar to Indonesian as American is to British or Australian. After 7 months wandering through Indonesia, we did what we could to pick up rudiments of that language so now we get two languages for the effort of one.

We were happy to put Indonesia over the horizon on our stern. Bali was a bust. The yacht agent at the neighboring island of Lombok and her coconspirator customs man, were combing our ships papers looking for any questionable marks for which to hold us ransom. But we held our ground and left town without bending to their corruption. But what a surprise clearing into the small country of Malaysia. The customs, immigration and harbormaster were all happy to have us enter their country. When seeing we are from the U.S., they would always exclaim “America, Obama!”. Everything happened so fast, so friendly, so uncorrupted, with a minimum of paperwork, we thought something had to be wrong, which might cause us problems later on. We had forgotten how a modern country works. In fact, they didn’t even ask for our clearance papers from Indonesia, the papers we had such a difficult time getting. Finally, we arrived in the land of educated people, normality.

And a modern country it is. The city of Kuching is as nice as any Australian or American small city, complete with divided 4 lane roads and long lines of rush hour traffic in the morning and evenings. New cars and SUVs were bumper to bumper. There are motorcycles, but not the heavy swarms that move more like herds clogging roads in other countries. This attests to the wealth of Malaysia. Oil rigs near shore and oil terminals on land help to finance the upscale lifestyle. Kuching in Malaysian means “cat”. There are a couple cat statues around the city, and of no great interest, a cat museum, but very few live cats roam around. No one really knows how the city wound up with its name but it is thought that an early native word was mistaken for “kuching” and when the Europeans arrived, and stayed, “Kuching” stuck.

We were anchored just inside of a muddy river at Santubang, 25 easy driving miles into the country. So we had country living with easy access to the big city via an inexpensive shuttle van that traveled the route several times a day. And to make it even better, one of the wealthiest people in Malaysia owns water front property where he operates a fish farming enterprise. His floating docks are there for visiting cruisers to tie their dinghies to and have free access to the water faucets. Anywhere else we have been in the world, someone would have been charging a significant day rate. The city water at the dock and throughout Malaysia, is healthy to drink which is quite unlike all of Indonesia and most other island nations we have visited in the Pacific.

Our first days in the Santubong and Kuching area of Malaysia gave us a big boost to our cruising attitudes, which had soured in our final days in Indonesia.
There was no shortage of activities in the Kuching area. National Parks are important to the Malaysians and they take conservation as seriously as the Americans and Australians. There were mountains to climb, park trails to explore, rare flowers and animals to spy, crocodiles and very venomous snakes to avoid and cultural events to participate in. Since Brick House was the only boat anchored in Santubong, and it would be two weeks before other cruising friends would drop anchor nearby, Rebecca and I sailed off to not so distant parks to start our explorations of the sights of Malaysia.

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