Christmas Presents

It’s amazing the kind of gifts that excite you when you live on a boat. Before we bought a boat and started cruising, I received the normal Christmas gifts…jewelry, perfume, lingerie and an array of things for the house. A few Christmases ago…before we started our incredible adventure; I received binoculars and an inflatable life jacket. My friends were not impressed! The binoculars have been used everyday…luckily I haven’t needed the life jacket. This Christmas we both received items that we will make cruising a little safer and easier and happy hour a little happier.

One thing I haven’t liked about living aboard was the lack of ice. We have a small freezer and there has never been room for more than one ice tray…well there’s room for more than one tray, but we do need to have room for food too. You can’t live on margaritas alone!  Santa (Stan) brought me a portable icemaker…I’m so excited. Life will be better this summer…I’m from the south and I love LOTS of ice in my drinks. Ice tea isn’t ice tea with out a lot of ice!

Stan’s big gift is a new radar with multi-function-display (chartplotter, depthsounder, etc.), The Pearl came with an old radar that we used a few time…mostly just to see if it would work if we needed it, and it did fine until this fall. About the time we decided we wanted to go to Maine next summer the radar quit working…I guess it didn’t want to be responsible for our safety on that trip! Stan’s new toy is on order and he will install it when we return to the boat…I’ll do a post on that when it we get back to Charleston.

The beautiful new addition to our boat.

Wonderful ice in just minutes...I love it!

Another gift we received for the boat is an antique anchor lamp. Although it's in prefect working condition...I think it'll stay in the salon as a decoration. What a great conversation piece.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from Texas and the crew of The Pearl. 2012 was a great cruising season for us. We enjoyed spending part of the season cruising with friends and made a lot more along the way. We enjoyed the spring working on boat projects at Atlantic Yacht Basin in Great Bridge, VA and rediscovering some of our favorite places in the Chesapeake. After Memorial Day we headed up the east coast and spent the summer exploring New York, the Erie Canal, Lake Ontario, the Thousand Islands, the Rideau Canal, Ottawa, Montreal, the Richelieu and Lake Champlain. This part of the country is amazingly beautiful and we fell in love with upstate New York. The sights and the weather couldn’t have been better. We have a lot of people who spend winter in our area of Texas…we call them “Winter Texans”…we have become “Summer Yankees”, and love it. There just isn’t a better place to be when the heat moves into the south. We finished our cruising season by enjoying September in Baltimore catching up with friends and sampling some of the great restaurants (and taverns) it has to offer.

The Pearl is docked in Charleston, SC for the winter and we plan to spend time there in February and March…doing a little exploring and a few projects on the boat. We’re not sure when we’ll move the boat back to the Chesapeake…but we will. Our plan does include spending Easter in Texas enjoying family and the wonderful spring weather. Our summer cruising plan is to explore New England…everything from Long Island Sound to Bar Harbor. Stay turned blog followers for more adventures in 2013.