Moving to Florida and Buying a Boat

In September 2015 I quit my job doing production support for a financial services website. The Austin Texas startup I worked for was acquired by a major bank and things eventually became untenable. I was 58 years old at the time, and intended to go back to work. But I had a hard time getting around looking for another job. What I really wanted to do was cruise the coast of Maine in a sailboat, but that wasn’t such an attractive option since winter was approaching.

I hatched a scheme to move to Florida and buy the smallest and cheapest boat I thought could make the trip, and sail up the eastern seaboard as the weather warmed up, and then cruise the coast of Maine the following summer. My family has a cabin on the coast of Maine, so that was my destination.

I knew a little about the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, and learned more reading blogs and websites. The idea of cruising on a river or canal was strangely attractive to me. I figured I’d stay in the ICW all the way to Norfolk, then have enough experience to make it up the Chesapeake and through the Chesapeake to Delaware Canal. Then the real sailing begins in Cape May NJ, when I’d meet blue water for the first time.

I lived in Austin for 22 years, and it was very hard to leave. I left a romantic relationship, and many good friends. I loved living in Austin, but I sensed it was time for a new chapter.

So on March 2016 I climbed into my car and headed for Florida. I camped the first night out, near Breaux Bridge LA. I slept in the car the next night for a few hours, as I was getting close to FL.

I knew if I stayed on I-10 I’d get to some fairly large city in Florida, which turned out to be Jacksonville. I didn’t even realize at first that it wasn’t on the coast, and is in fact about 20 miles inland on the St John river.

I got into Jacksonville in the morning and found a McDonalds. I had a cell phone with no data plan, so McD was my “internet cafe.” I jumped onto the Jacksonville craigslist site and started looking for boats. I found my dream boat almost right away. I called and talked to the seller and we agreed to meet later that day.

The boat was a Pacific Seacraft 25, and what a pretty little thing she was. I was immediately smitten with her.

I had planned to camp until I found and bought a boat to live on. During that first day I looked for a campsite, and they were all booked up because it was spring break somewhere in the country. I stayed in a hotel that night and the next day I bought the boat, after arranging with the dock-master of the marina that I could live-aboard while I got the boat ready for the trip.

Here she is:

The boat’s name was Serenity. I loved this boat! I think she’s beautiful, and the cockpit was great. It was small, but deep and tucked in behind that fairly high house. Traditional cutter rig with staysail and jib. I really thought she was what I wanted. But the fact is I hadn’t ever sailed a traditional, long keel heavy displacement boat before.

The first time I tried sailing her without power (explained below) I took off out of a slip about 3/4 of the way up the channel (slips on both sides). The wind was light and coming from the beam, and I thought I’d be able to come up close hauled and either get out, or be able to tack a couple times and get out to the river. Well, in a Catalina 27 I might have had a chance, but with the PC-25 and it’s long keel, I just sailed straight across the channel and smashed viciously into a skiff in a slip on the other side. And of course everyone in the marina was watching and enjoying the show. The skiff was one of those boats that fold flat. They are tough little mothers because this thing survived my assault and looked pretty okay. I offered to pay the owner of the skiff for any damage, but he was gracious about it and told me not to worry.

I was able to get the boat moved to a slip nearer the river and from there I was able to sail Serenity in and out of her slip, but it was tricky. She accelerated slowly and turned very gradually. The first time I came about I was amazed how much space I needed. It reminded of a song my late brother-in-law sang called “Give Me 40 Acres and I’ll Turn This Rig Around.” As I tacked out the Ortega River toward the bridge I wouldn’t try to tack unless I had a clear area about the size of a football field. You are generally prohibited from sailing through a drawbridge, so I couldn’t go out onto the St Johns river and was constrained to small area of the Ortega River.

Above: Me sailing Serenity in the Ortega River.

The person I bought the boat from was less than forthcoming about some of the details of the boat’s condition. There were issues with the Vetus diesel engine that I thought were repairable, but eventually learned the engine needed a full rebuild, which would have cost more than I paid for the boat. I thought I could get by with a small outboard engine and fabricate a mount for it (hard to bolt an outboard onto a double-ender).

Friends at the marina I lived in were skeptical about the outboard idea. They said that was fine for running in and out of a marina when you’re day sailing, but not okay for going almost a thousand miles in waterways used by large commercial vessels.

I put a lot of work and money into this boat during the spring. I decided to drive to Maine and spend the summer there, and was looking at substantial costs to store the boat. I also made a lot of new friends at the marina I was living in, and one of those friends had a boat for sale that I was interested in. So I decided to sell the Pacific Seacraft. I paid $6000 for it and sold it for $4500. And learned some important lessons. I also lived on the boat for 3 months, and had a wonderful experience getting to know the folks who lived at the marina. Everyone I met in this marina was welcoming and friendly, and I was part of a community right away. Dockmaster Paul was so gracious and welcoming and supportive of me in so many ways, as were many others.

So I spent the summer in Maine and Massachusetts, and drove back to Florida at the end of September 2016. On the way I stopped in Annapolis to visit a friend from the marina and bought a boat from him. He had rescued a Cascade 29 from the Annapolis area the year before. He had a friend help him re-power the boat with a Yanmar 3GM30 engine. This engine had been manufactured about 15 years before, but my friend bought it from someone who got it for a project that never came to fruition. It was still in the Yanmar packing crate. He took the boat to Florida and it was stored on the hard at Green Cove Springs Marina, on the St John River about 20 miles upstream from Jacksonville. Here she is the first time I saw her.

So I had seen the boat before I went to Maine that summer. I loved the look of the PS-25, but she very small inside. Not only did it not have standing headroom, I couldn’t even quite sit up straight when sitting at the settee. The Cascade had, for me, almost standing headroom, and is of course much larger overall. I spent $9,500 on this boat, much more than I had anticipated. But by then I was committed to living on a sailboat and doing the trip up the coast.

After arriving back in Florida, I spend a few nights sleeping on a big power cruiser at Ortega River Marina, where I lived on the PS-25. A wonderful old gentlemen lived on it and was happy to put me up. I had a bit of work to do getting the Cascade ready to launch, but got that done quickly. I arranged with Green Cove Springs marina to launch the Cascade and, motored her downstream to my marina in Jacksonville.