February 2023: Behind the Scenes

Between our YouTube Channel and our blog, we share a lot of our life on the water. However, there are always things that go undocumented. Over the years, we have met plenty of new liveaboards who feel like they were “duped” into this lifestyle by its romanticized portrayal on social media. In our experience, living full-time on a boat is expensive, it is hard work, and it is time-consuming. Is it worth it? For us, yes. Is it worth it for you? I’m not sure!

So, in an effort to paint a more realistic picture of boat life, here is a bullet-point list of things we failed to document in February 2023:

• The bottom of our cockpit fridge has rusted and crumbled. The entire drawer needs to be replaced, which will cost around $1,000. We will likely wait and take the opportunity to upgrade to a freezer/ice maker combo unit later.
• We paid $7.04 per foot per night to stay at Crown Bay Marina in St. Thomas for our lithium installation + solar upgrade. 
• The headsets we use while docking stopped working. Ray was able to take them apart and repair them. They’re not even two years old and were $400.00, so we were disappointed to be having issues with them.
• Our top-loading fridge in the salon needed to be recharged; Ray was able to do it himself with supplies we already had on board. The supplies initially cost ~$100.
• We broke 13 drill bits trying to get a bolt out of the pole that our dinghy davit blocks are attached to. The blocks fell off last month, but we didn’t have the tools we needed to properly extract the bolts at the time.
• We paid 24.99/month for a mailbox at Island Mail in St. Thomas.