I’m going to attempt to kick off more regular daily blogging on Tahina Expedition. Some of the posts will just be a summary of some of the many hundreds of tasks we’re performing in preparation for the trip. The blogging may also be an expanded version of micro-blog posts I’m making at the @GoTahina twitter account.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the many recent big tasks we’ve been working on:
- Insurance – We’re been working on getting the boat insurance lined up for our first year at sea. If you think insurance for your house is high, you would freak out about paying for a boat at sea. Let’s just say it is the single biggest annual budget line item for the ongoing boat expenses (more than food).
- Purchases – The next three months are a final stages of equipment purchases. A great deal of time has gone into researching what we need over the course of the past several years. Now it all comes to finding good prices and making sure everything fits and works well together. In September we’ll be taking Tahina to a boatyard and having it hauled out so we can install some of the equipment and perform final maintenance to have Tahina in tip-top shape before we depart.
- Health care – Once we leave our home country, we have to rely on a different form of health insurance. This pretty much means we have to buy medicines on our own. We’ve been using the Internet to find the best prices, but buying from foreign pharmacies has a lot of pitfalls.
- Maintenance – Owning a boat means constant maintenance. Even when you’re not living on it yet. Recent projects include cleaning, shining stainless steel, waxing, and maintenance on head pumps (the least favorite of all tasks). Completed head maintenance on our main unit a week ago.
- Home – Our biggest tasks at the moment are getting our house projects done so we can get it on the market for selling. We are now in the final stages, and hope to be ready by the end of this month. Of course, we’ve been saying that for three months now.
