The Beginning

We have made the decision to go cruising.

Mark lost a job with HP last Fall and Liz took an early retirement from PDI this Spring.

We spent the Spring preparing the house for sale and put it on the market June 5. It sold within a month and closed on August 14.

A huge amount of work went into deciding what to take and what to store and what to liquidate. We have rented a 20x8x8.5 storage container and filled it flor to ceiling and wall to wall with things we hope to use when we reenter the land world. We held a estate/moving sale and sold a large amount of furniture and possessions. Stone Soup a charity in St. Paul Park was the recipient of large amounts of clothing and furnishings.

Our boat, E 2 motion, a CAL 39 built in 1980 has undergone extensive work this summer. Our dock neighbor and close friend Patrick Moore has accomplished incredible feats with some help from Mark. This included:

Replacing the transmission

Replacing the Water Heater

Upgrading the propane locker from 5 lbs to 20 lbs capacity.

Installing a Holding Plate Refrigeration system from Technautics

Extending the drawers in the Galley, and both Berths to increase the storage by 100%

Building a new cabinet in the galley where the old refrigeration unit had been

Building new doors to enclose several open cabinets to make storage more secure.

Liz has spent a great deal of effort organizing and stowing the stores on the boat. We are almost able to store everything securely for sailing. The boat sits several inches lower in the water but seems to be handling it well.

Our plan is to leave Bayport, MN on the St. Croix River on September 10, 2009. We will head down the Mississippi River to Cairo Illinois (811 miles). At this point we will turn up the Ohio River for about 100 miles and then turn south on the Tennessee River entering the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway and reaching Mobile AL. This should take about 60 days. From Mobile we will head for Isla Mujeres, QR, Mexico and then down the coast to Belize.