Our new boat/new adventure!!

Can’t believe I'm writing this… and certainly can’t believe I’m writing it from onboard our new boat!

Wow. Just... wow.

We spent the last few weeks prepping/packing, and the day finally came - for us to board our flights to Europe and meet and move aboard the new boat.

Of course, there was a brief stopover in Valencia, Spain — because weather windows kept shifting and we could only change flights so many times (let's not forget that up until a week ago, the plan was to have David deliver the boat all the way to Gibraltar or southern Spain - so we're adapting as best we can).
Of course, as luck/nature would have it, there was also a named storm bearing down on Valencia as we arrived, and our phone was blaring flood warnings at us - which made us fear we'd never leave. But all’s well that ends well.

In fact, we even had a moment to swing by and look at a potential future overland rig (our dream land/overland vehicle - a 4x4 MB Vario)… because it’s never too early to start dreaming about/prepping for the next leg of the adventure. ;)

Anyway, the storm missed Valencia (mostly), and we were able to catch our flight and arrive in a Coruña at dusk, meaning we arrived at the boat well after dark.
It was wet, and we were freezing - even before getting out of the Uber and walking across a dark, puddle-ridden parking lot. By the time we found the right gate and hit the ramp down to the dock, my feet were drenched (water shoes clearly are not going to cut it for this leg of our adventure), the wind was cutting - but we couldn’t possibly care or be bothered.

I could hear the sound of our suitcases' wheels clicking across the wooden boards of the dock increasing as we instinctively walked faster and faster toward the boat. By the end, it was hard to hold back from a full sprint, but our eyes finally saw her - pretty easy to spot as the only boat in the marina with lights on… who else would possibly be crazy enough to live on a boat in these conditions? ;)

We paused to check ourselves and make sure this was real, then stepped over the water threshold between the dock and boat and with one last breath - we stepped aboard our new floating home. Just like that, our next chapter had begun.

Completely and utterly surreal.
Without words... yet here I am, trying my best to find them.

David got off a call and welcomed us aboard. He had 2 electric heaters running to cut the cold, and the place felt like the best Airbnb we've seen in months. Certainly not yet like home, and not yet ours, but we were buzzing with excitement to see her - and also hungry and exhausted.

We chatted for a while and then walked through the cold, misting rain towards town, with its Christmas lights drawing us into the historic city, where we tried to choose from the hundreds of tapas joints a place to enjoy a meal and a few glasses of wine.

The next day, David did his best to give us a full tour and pass along some knowledge from his days onboard before having to catch a flight out. The plan was to take the boat out into the bay and do a proper shakedown/handoff, but the howling winds kept us right where we sat. In the end, there's really no way to get to know her until we sail her anyway.

We would spend about a week here — waiting for a decent weather window (no easy task between the passing blows coming in from across the Atlantic) and doing our best to stock the boat with everything from food to utensils/appliances to towels and sheet sets (and us with socks and jackets and yes... eventually even foot prisons).

Obviously, these are the normal activities of moving into a new home one might expect. Runs to the IKEA or Leroy Merlin (closest thing to a Home Depot here) — made slightly more difficult by it being in a foreign country, by not having a vehicle, and by having to carry everything back by hand one load at a time.

Mostly, we killed time and tried to stay warm until a weather window looked close enough/safe enough to venture out into the Atlantic.

Almost forgot, but before leaving we also did the most important task of officially christening the boat, paying our tidings to Poseidon and the orca spirit guides - and then dropped our lines and left the safe harbor, nerves just about as high as you might expect for a couple about to sail in big seas aboard a boat they've never sailed before and facing weather patterns they know nothing about. We didn't quite feel like the rookies we started out as 7years ago, but it wasn't far off.

While we have no first-hand knowledge/experience - we liken this to what friends have described as the feeling of leaving the hospital with your firstborn child. Happy/elated, sure… but also a nagging feeling that they must certainly have forgotten to tell you something or to give you something. That they certainly couldn't just be letting you walk out the front door with a tiny human and no guidance or manual to follow.

Wait. They just… let us leave?
With this huge, shiny vessel? No manual? No 24/7 tech support? Nobody to take it off the dock or sail it for us??
But in the end… they figured it out and everyone appears to be surviving, and so will we.

The weather — while the calmest window we'd seen by far (it is December and we were leaving the edge of the bay of Biscay - which is notoriously horrible after all) - was anything but calm or smooth. Our 2 days/nights offshore from a Coruña to Nazaré were intense, especially as our first sail in a year and learning all the workings of the boat as we went along.

The wind and the seas both started as planned - enough so that we only took a single reef before dark (and thinking even that wasn’t needed), but then had to take a second in the darkness at 2am and the third at 4am as conditions continued to elevate. No better way to learn than half-asleep and feeling your way in the darkness, I guess!

We both struggled with being woozy/nauseous (thankfully, not something we typically have to deal with) and also had several rookie reminders as we forgot to stow things and had a big wave send them scattered around the boat - and forgot to switch our Starlink over to offshore use, which left us without Wi-Fi or communication for a decent portion of our journey. That won’t happen again... as it’s now high on all of our checklists.

We had allowed for the flexibility to continue onward as conditions allowed (they didn't) but a unanimous vote led us to pull into Nazaré just before sunset on Christmas Day.
Equal parts us being willing/excited to be done, and Nazaré simply seeming like the perfect layover for the holiday… the name clearly signifying that this must be the coastal birthplace of Jesus (or so we assumed) - the symbolic star of our journey leading is to the protected manger.

Turns out the claim to fame is simply that a small wooden statue of Mary eventually made its way here after the birth - but we prefer the idea that the new family came here to enjoy the coast after getting kicked out of the manger in Bethlehem (presumably also without a set of instructions for how to raise their newborn).

Obviously, most things were closed, but we walked along the esplanade from the marina to town, stopped to marvel at the stray cat townhouses erected along the way (this town loves their strays), and found the only establishment open for business, where we settled in for a G&T in the sand to watch the end of the sunset and toast/reflect on a job well done.

With the sun no longer there to maintain any semblance of warmth on the beach, we walked back to the marina hand in hand, crawled into bed, and let the gentle sway of the boat lull us quickly to sleep.

Maybe we’ve been thinking about it backwards all along - maybe it’s not us learning the boat, but the learning to let the boat care for us.

Merry Christmas to all - and to us, a good (quiet, grateful, well earned) sleep.