Another post that starts with a toilet picture.

But the good thing about this toilet picture is that it is the final installed version of our new Airhead! Woo hoo!
Ok. No more toilets.

On to Jenny's new hammock: Jenny's turn to type:
ohmygoodness I have been waiting for this for soooooooooo long!!! I love it. Boston Organics loves my food hammock.


In the meantime, we bought a sheet of formica, meant to cover the table. Justin and I spent our sweet little time making sure we cut the formica out nice and perfectly. We had to make a line in it then break the formica on the line. The cut went really well, but as soon as we went to break it, everything went horrendously. The corners broke off and everything self destructed. Luckily, we were not only able to salvage the piece to re-cover the fridge, but Justin was able to save what pieces were leftover to cover the table.

This is the only picture we have of the table (corner), finished. Pretty!


Justin speaking again: My sister came to visit! Can you tell she's my sis? Just a bit.


Both of us grew up on Calvin and Hobbes as pictured here:


And more recently, as pictured here on my sister's leg. Perhaps she is more of a hardy pirate than I am because I still haven't gotten a tattoo despite my great want of one.... I think I'm inspired though and mine is coming soon... (anchors away!)


While my sis (Angie) was here we also went to a cool bar in Cambridge called "River Gods". They have this sweet-o river goddess thingy made of sticks and brambles hanging from the ceiling.


We went to Marblehead to our friend Nicola's house for Easter. There was a nifty old wood boat being worked on down the street.


More pictures from Easter in Marblehead can be found at Noah's picasa web album.
Check them out...he took some great pictures.


And to wrap things up, just some fun pics of each of us while we were playing cards after the River Gods evening. :)




Thanks for visiting Angie!

-Justin and Jenny

Jigsaw Indexing

Living aboard a boat is a quirky thing. It is not for everyone, but for some of us it is everything. For those who live this life it seems that different people enjoy the concept of "living aboard" in different ways.

On one end of the spectrum there are people who live in offshore sailboats and try their absolute hardest never to touch foot on dry land. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who live in pontoon style houseboats with no form of locomotion and simply enjoy living on the water and in the marina but otherwise live a fairly normal life.

We have, for the most part, lived somewhere in the middle but closer to the sedentary pontoon version. Our boat is not made for offshore, we have real jobs to attend, and frankly we really like our life of heading to sea whenever we can--usually on the weekends in the summer.

One has to wonder though: what would it be like to sail away for a six month journey?
In this boat, we will never know. Thus, we have already been extensively internet shopping for what may be next in our purchasing crosshairs. Fisher 37's and Westsail 42's both look rather jazzy. As do the Formosa 51's and 47's. I could ramble quite a few sailboat types (and especially pilothouse motorsailors) that I've come to enjoy gawking at, but it won't do me a lick of good until we have a bit more of an extended plan.

I present to you: www.jigsawindexing.com

This is our new baby (sorry Willie, you are no longer an only child). As of this week we are kicking off our new company Jigsaw Indexing. As part of her master's degree Jenny was trained in how to create the surprisingly complex and convoluted thing at the end of a book called an "index". We've been spending the last couple months making some business purchases and getting things set up. We are now ready to index.

How exactly does this get back to living aboard?

Fishers, Westsails, Formosas, and others are very pricey and we need to save our pennies. Jigsaw may help bring in some of those pennies. More importantly these are boats which can live at sea for extended times--even if it is just living on a mooring up the coast a bit in Salem :) We can continue our full time jobs, index as a part time business, and save those pennies til we can afford one of the aforementioned expensive watercraft. Upon purchase, we can move to a mooring (Salem or otherwise) and save a TON of money that we currently pour into paying Constitution Marina for an in-city dock slip. Thus, we can perhaps afford our new payments, and if the option presents itself in a couple years we can take leave of our land based jobs and move on to indexing full time. Then we can have the freedom to move about the seven seas at our free will--pushing us further to the other end of the spectrum I spoke of earlier.

Also, I can continue to pursue archaeology. Here in New England the contract archaeology companies need lots more help in the summers (when the ground is dig-able). In the winters we can sail south (or north or east or west I suppose) and I can put my work back into indexing again for the archaeological off-season.

Will we like that lifestyle and is it possible? I dunno, we weren't sure of our current one until we tried to make it happen. Now, we've made it here and we love it. Lots.

Moral of the story is, if you or anyone you know is publishing non-fiction books, writing them, or otherwise involved with the production thereof please contact us. justin@jigsawindexing.com should do the trick :)


(right now, we're really leaning toward the fisher 37's aftcabin version - here is some guy's site full of pics of them)

:)
Justin

Minor improvements.

Our first haul out is coming sometime in the next two months. We'll be getting bottom paint, new zincs, new thru-hull fittings, our stuffing boxes re-stuffed, new props, and some trim-tab work all done. It will be dang pricey. In the meantime, we've had to stick with little and inexpensive fixes.

Got a cheap piece of formica from the discount bin at home depot. It is solid black with dot imprint pattern, kinda nice actually. We used it to refinish the dinette table (which was the same ol' junk that was on the counter before the tile job) and we also resurfaced the refrigerator (which was the original 1978 yellow plastic painted over 65 times and all scratched up). So those cheap improvements have done wonders to big ugly areas of our boat.

We bought a fruit and bread hammock today so that we can finally stop stowing it all in our microwave haha. What a pain that was to empty the micro every time you want to use it.

And also, our new Airhead toilet-which was backordred- finally arrived a few weeks ago. So far, it works awesome! We've been using it regular and no problems as yet.

I'll get pics of all this stuff eventually. Too busy lately though.

Of what is and what will be....

Our intent with the blog has always been to keep it real simple. Easily navigable. Pictures, text, and sorted by date. Nice and plain.

That is still the plan; however, we have added a couple nice things and plan to add one or two more.

Notably, we put up a music player which is now at the bottom of the column on the right. This plays a combination of two types of music which seem to represent the purest essence of living aboard--to us anyhow. Type one- fun, drinking, pirate party, good times songs. Type two- transcendental, relaxing, sometimes other-worldy, relaxation songs... better put, songs to fit the landscape (or lack there0f) on the ocean. You have to click play, or click on a song title to make it work. If you start with the first song the playlist flows pretty smoothly.

Next, Jenny has been adding "labels". (Yes, she really is a librarian at heart). If you click the labels at the bottom of the posts it will take you to all posts that talk of that label.

That, is what is already done.

Sometime soon I hope to add a link in the right which is all about our boat, "The Fitzcarraldo". I've noticed, when trying to show inquiring people, what our boat looks like that it is often hard to find good pics of it without having to search back through all the old months of posts. I hope to remedy this with one tell-all page of stats and pictures.

Anyhow... Just keeping you informed.

-Justin

Chews Wisely.

Jenny took this picture of Willie and it turned out so neat that we decided to post it (and a few others for the heck of it).

As winter meanders on Willie remains the center of attention here aboard the Fitz. We are rather enjoying his company. So far he is turning out to be a splendid dog. Not too big (yet). He is darn near potty trained now. He "chews wisely" and has yet to chew up anything which is not one of his own toys. All is well.

In the meantime, just felt like posting a few pics of the marina so all of the dirt dwellers can see what life aboard is like :)

our finger pier and wrap door:

Our neighbor's dinghy:


B-dock viewed from the harborwalk path:

Constitution Marina from the harborwalk:
And of course, Jenny with Willie:

and us with Willie:

Also, he is taking to the cold much better now. Doesn't mind being out for walks as long as it isn't frigid out. Still unsure of the snow though. He'd just assume avoid it for now.

that's all for now. Pizza Time!

-Justin

health and rain and other such things

The dog, Willie, has only been here for 10 days now and he is already growing like a weed. Still doesn't look like he will get *too* big. But just big enough for him to seem like a real dog. If you know what I mean. Seems to be fairly smart--already learning some things. Others are taking a bit. Only chews on his toys, which is great.

In other news, Jenny signed us up for www.bostonorganics.com. They bring us great organic fruits and veggies and drop them off right on our boat. Makes shopping wonderfully easy.

To augment the organic foods we also joined a gym. Holy healthy eh!

Also new to report is that we have a new woodstove. Though I have no pics of it yet. The old one only functioned ok. It had a lot of poor features, some of which seemed dangerous. One of our liveaboard friends still had a stove that he used to use about 5 years ago before he converted to diesel. He let us borrow it to try instead of ours. It is awesome. Old cast iron heavy looking thing. It warms the boat much better and seems safer. We will be striking a deal with him soon which will allow this one to become ours.

thats all for now!
-Justin

Willie

Well, after approximately two or so years of egging each other on to get a dog, Justin and I decided to wait no longer. We are the proud new parents of a 3 month old pup, Willie.

He seems to be a chihuahua/beagle/terrier mix, so we don't think he'll get enormous (he's 7 lbs. currently...we expect that he'll maybe get to be around 20 lbs. or so).

Anyway, onto pictures!!
I'm also going to attempt some video as well.