Roughing it in a First Class Marina

We have been living aboard for 1 week – at a marina that doesn’t have electricity or water at our slip yet. We have been living ‘off-grid’ in our first class marina. The marina is not technically open for the season yet, because there are no amenities, besides a dock to tie up at, available.

Onshore bathrooms are available, across the parking lot. On site bathrooms will be coming soon. There is no internet either. Its real ‘off-grid’ living. Needless to say we were running low on water and diesel (to run the generator to re-fill our batteries due to the lack of the ability to plug-into shore power.)

So we decided to take a short trip down the bay to another marina to fuel up, and fill up on water.

Since arriving on the dock a week ago, with the previous owner aboard and providing tips, we had not moved Jelanea. She had been tied up and nice and cozy on our dock, with no need to go anywhere. But we needed diesel and we needed water, and we needed to take the plunge and move her for the first time as well.

This was the kids first trip aboard Jelanea as well. So not only were we newbies on operating a 42’ boat on our own, but we had two small children to keep on board and safe as well. Luckily our 8 year old is a huge helper with his little sister, and can be given tasks to do. This proved very helpful.

The two year old, on the other hand, wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of being tethered to the boat. We had tested her harness earlier in the week, and discovered that our little Scallywag could easily remove herself from said harness. Since we were moving the boat, we put her life-jacket over top of the harness, which prevented her Houdini skill from being useful. But she was NOT pleased when we connected a tether and clipped her to anything, despite the fact that she was just sitting in the cockpit, with plenty of slack on the tether, she didn’t like it but would have to deal with it.

Tristan helped Ben get the lines off the dock, and we were off! I put Jelanea into reverse and back we went. In a moment of confusion, I couldn’t remember which way to turn the wheel to get the stern to go to starboard so we could exit our slip. I’m thankful that there were no other boats docked anywhere around us, as the stress of hitting another dock was plenty for my first trip as true captain of Jelanea.

So we backed out to port, because by the time I realized which way the stern was going, it was too late for corrections. We then did a 180 in between the docks until we were facing toward the exit of the marina. I was pretty proud that I didn’t hit anything on the way out of the slip.

The trip over to the fuel dock at Dimillos was slow and steady. We ended up having to wait for a few minutes while another boat cleared the dock, and then I executed a beautiful landing on the fuel dock.

We fueled up first, then filled our water tanks. The dock-hand said that while the water was technically potable, he didn’t fully trust the hose it was run through,so we pulled out the water filter (I knew right where it was after our exhaustive re-organizing of the boat) and ran all the water through the filter on the way to our tanks.

As we sat on the fuel dock and Dimillos, the famous Maine fog rolled in. When we were ready to cast off for home, we could only see about 50 ft in any direction. So our first return to our home slip was going to be flying mostly blind.

At this point I was pretty grateful we had decided to turn on the chart plotter for the 1/2 mile trip, as I was able to follow our track on the plotter and know it was a safe route.

We did see 2 other boats along the way, a small water taxi, which passed in front of us easily, and just as we were approaching the marina entrance, another sailboat that docks at our marina drifting outside the entrance.

We called for docking assistance on the radio, and seconds after we called the other boat called as well. They allowed us to go first and we crawled toward the entrance, barely able to see the split in the docks that we needed to go through.

The docking at our home-slip was not terrible, but also not great, I swung a little wide and the dock-hands had to pull us in a bit. Altogether it was a pretty good docking for my 2nd try as solo operator of Jelanea.

By the time we got back to our dock and settled in it was 8:30pm and the kids were hungry. I had tried to make dinner earlier, before we left the dock, so it would be ready when we arrived back, but couldn’t get the stove to light. Ben got it to light right away at 8:30, and heated up some leftover soup for the kids, who we then put right to bed and both of them were out in minutes.

We then made sure Jelanea was tied up the way we like her, cleaned up the deck and put away the water filter and deck plate tool. We then went to bed shortly after, exhausted after our first expedition aboard our new home.