<Written by Rachel>

OK – finally sitting down to give you guys an update. I’m ashamed to say that we went the entire month of May without posting a blog update, which is the first month that we’ve missed posting even one blog post since we started. I’m a little bummed about that but it just didn’t work out and I’m going to brush it off and move on. THAT is the kind of thing that’s not worth my time stressing about, right!? Ha.

Well, it’s June 1st. We moved back aboard the first weekend of May, the weekend after our last blog post and a week later than we had planned at the writing of that post. Again, something that isn’t worth stressing over!

So we have been happily back living aboard Mosaic for the past 4 weeks. It has been great settling back into our normal routine. It’s also really exciting to look forward a couple weeks and imagine how much our day to day lives are going to change mid-month when Evan finishes school. The end of the school year marks the beginning of our home-schooling adventure and a whole new set of opportunities. More on that in a moment…

Sailing Family Preparing for Cruising

Project Updates

The Mast:

Well, we still sit here in our slip without our mast. It is finally finished being painted but now we’re waiting on new tangs to be built and polished for us. Unfortunately, our rigger didn’t take a close look at them earlier as he’s just been swamped with work and come time to clean them up to use on the freshly painted mast he realized that, shoot, they need to be replaced. So they had to be fabricated by the same local company that made our new chainplates (the good ones), Specialty Metal Fabricators in Portland OR. We haven’t seen the new tangs yet, but they’re completed and are now at another shop for electropolishing. The tangs are the metal pieces that hold the standing rigging, the cables that hold up the mast, to the mast itself.

The tangs should be ready by the mid-next-week and then Butch can start prepping the mast to get it ready to get back onto our boat.

Once the mast and new rig is ready, we’ll need to make arrangements with work so that we can bring the boat back to the boatyard. It will need to stay overnight at the yard and they’ll have the crane out the next day to step the mast. Ideally, we will then be able to return to the boat that day, or the next morning, and begin the journey back home.

The water level in the river is quite high right now so we expect that we won’t be able to return to our marina via the same route we’ve always taken thus far. We’re pretty sure the mast won’t fit under the Sauvie’s Island Bridge at this point, due to the water levels, so we’ll most likely have to go the long way around and take a couple days to get back to the marina, stopping somewhere along the way. We’ll turn it into a weekend event and can hopefully just have some fun with the trip home.

Our Chainplates:

The chainplate project is wrapping up well .. knock on wood. We’ve got 4 of the 6 new chainplates installed and they don’t appear to be leaking water when it rains. Yay! Two to go on that project and we’re expecting to have those wrapped up tomorrow.

I asked Evan to take some photos the other evening while Brenden and I installed one of the chainplates. I need to go through those photos but I plan to write up a blog post detailing how we’re going about the installation. I’ll update this post with a link once I’ve got that written.

cruising family preparations - sailing

sailing family chainplate replacement

New Dinghy:

One of our major headaches now is the new dinghy we ordered at the beginning of the year. It’s been back-ordered, basically, and we still don’t know yet when we will receive shipment. Update today from the Inflatable Boat Center says it should be here by the end of June. I sure would love to have that now that the weather is getting nice. I’d love to take it zipping around for some fun with the kiddos!

The Oven:

Installed and working wonderfully, I’m happy to report. I’ve baked a loaf of fresh bread in the oven and it turned out fabulously. It even fits a medium size pizza.

sailing family in portland oregon prepping to go cruising

Moving Forward

The 15th is the last day of school for Evan. From there, I am excited to implement a new schedule for my work time and balancing non-work time with the kids. Working from home allows for many freedoms but also some complications such as finding time to work without interruption. I’m hoping to routinely work for a 2-3 hour block fairly early in the morning before turning off electronics and utilizing the later morning and early afternoon for family time with the kids, short day-trips and hikes, and eventually phasing in some home-school lessons after a ‘detox’ period with Evan.

Kali is set to have a 2-week intensive swim lesson set starting the week after school ends. That will finish at the end of June and we’ll cancel her regular swim lessons at that point. If needed, I plan to sign her up for another 2-week intensive lesson in July. She’s coming along very nicely with her skills in the pool though so I’m interested to see where she’s at come the end of June.

Hopefully, by July, we might be able and ready to actually start taking the boat out for some sailing. We don’t have any new update on the potential to move to the Puget Sound this summer except for the acknowledgment that we are both very eager to make it happen. Brenden has spoken with his boss and was encouraged, but we haven’t gotten approval yet. The limiting factor is the unknown of the internet set up for working from the boat in the Puget Sound. I’m doing a lot of research checking into internet options for the region. If you’ve got any insight on that front, I would LOVE to hear from you!

As always, thanks for reading and I hope to get on a better schedule for posting weekly blogs- that’s my goal anyway.

Follow along for more quick pictures and updates on Facebook and Instagram @mosaicvoyage. Adios! ~Rachel

boat kids preparing for sailing and cruising