Happy Holidays! Big News!

Wow! It is hard to believe that Christmas will be here in just a few days and we will be closing out 2015 in a little over a week! Time sure does fly.  We are having a blast in our tiny home, getting ready  for the holidays, preserving some holiday traditions while also creating some new ones.  We were able to put a small tree in our tiny space.  We have kept presents to a minimal but this Christmas will definitely be one to remember... 

We bought a boat!!  After several months of working out details and negotiations we are super excited to say that we have purchased our new sailing home.  She is a beautiful 1979 Mariner 48 and we are super excited to move aboard.  She is in need of some work so it will be a couple of months before we fully transition to living aboard, but we are one step closer to realizing our sailing dreams.

We had searched for months before finding Empyrean but, the moment we stepped aboard, we knew she was the boat we had been searching for. The buying process took several months, as we went back and forth with surveys and negotiations. It was definitely a test of our patience but the wait paid off big as we were able to get a boat that was just what we were looking for at a price that didn't break the bank (at least not yet).

We will be working on Empyrean over the next months outfitting her for offshore.  We are currently working on replacing one of her diesel tanks.  Upcoming projects will include new rigging and new electronics. We will also be removing the old heads and holding tanks and replacing them with composting heads.  

Follow us on the biggest adventure of our life as we prepare our new home to depart for Mexico in the fall of 2016!  We will be adding lots of pics and videos of projects that we are working on!

Happy Holidays and Fair Winds From the Wada Family 

Sail Repair - By Emily

As many sailors know, repairs and upgrades for the boat never cease to appear. Our motto seems to be the same as Lowe's hardware store, "Never stop improving." Our most recent repair is that of our headsail. A couple months back we tore the grommet on our poor old sail and were in need of a repair. Knowing the owner pretty well, we decided to take it over to Kettenhofen Marine, a sail and rigging loft, for a check up. Mr. K had done a wonderful job repairing our sail and sent a list of what he had done to get our sail back in shape. He had to replace the grommet at the tack, restitch the rope, and replace two areas of webbing. Our sail is now in working condition and ready for some action!

Before

After

After

Tiny Living - Making the Move

It has been quite some time since I have blogged, mostly because life has been crazy here.  I promise that long absences are a thing of the past. I want to make sure that I keep the blog up to date, if for no other reason than to be able to look back on our progress. We have been very busy trying to get settled into some major life changes.  Making life changes when you are a couple can be extremely trying so making life changes when it involves several kiddos can seem like an impossible feat. However, I am happy to say we are all adjusting even better than expected.

Let me catch things up. We decided some months ago that life

was too complicated, too stressful and we needed a change. We had acquired too much stuff, too many unnecessary worries, and overall our minds and bodies seemed cluttered with things that just weren't enjoyable. After purchasing Southwind and refitting her we knew for sure that the sea was calling our family louder than ever. And so we went to work evolving a plan. 

Our first step would be to get rid of stuff that was tying us down.  This may sound easy and I thought, since I love to organize and clean out, that it would be relatively easy work for me.  Boy was I in for a rude awakening. We spent weeks, going through everything that we had collected, trying to pair down to necessities.  I taped off a section in our family room and told the family that everything we would keep needed to fit in this small space (approximately 6x8).  We began to pile things that seemed important into the space and it began to fill up…fast!  Then we would reevaluate and more stuff would be piled into garage sale piles. Before all was said and done we would have three garage sales, multiple ads on Craigslist and Ebay, of course carloads to take to charity, and a huge trash collection day. The more we let go of, the more weight that seemed to be lifted. We really started to feel good about going tiny. 

By the end of September we were ready to make a move out of our 5 bedroom home. This brings us to where we are today. We have moved into our travel trailer and are embracing the simpler life. It is crowded, but we are finding ways to make life work in small spaces. There are five of us and one bathroom vs. the luxury of three bathrooms. We are learning so many things like patience, new organizing skills, and more importantly how much we can enjoy each others company. We are playing board games, cooking together, and just enjoying being a close family. We are discovering new ways to leave a much smaller footprint everyday. It isn’t all perfect bliss but we can truly say we are happier than we remember being in a long, long time.

 


So, where will we go from here? Well, we are certain that a bluewater cruiser is in our very near future.  We have some things in the works and are excited to soon be sharing news of a new, much more permanent, home.

It's been awhile...

Happy Halloween everybody, it's been awhile since we've updated hasn't it. We are still here and still trying to achieve our goal of living the sailing life. We have been busy downsizing from our 2600 sq. ft. home to a 27ft travel trailer and let me tell you that it is a lot harder than you might think. We are moving in to our trailer for now till we find our new blue water sailboat that we will begin our sailing adventures on.  We'll post about our downsizing in another blog.  Fair winds and thanks for reading.

Launch day video

What's the Plan?

What's the plan?  This question seems to be what we are asking ourselves daily.  Our family knows, and has for sometime known, that we want to make some big life changes.  We want to see the world, expose our girls to other cultures, discover new places, learn to be self sufficient and learn to live small in a big way. 

How to make that happen has been the struggle we have faced.  It isn't always easy to make changes, especially ones that will change everything about our life.  We live pretty comfortably, our girls have plenty of stuff, too much stuff, we all do.   Leaving all that stuff behind and doing something huge is scary,  but exciting.  We have had a half a million family discussions on what we want to do, where we want to go and how we want to get there.  

And we are ready to share...we have a plan!  We are selling ALL of the stuff that weighs us down and we are going to move aboard our boat and travel the world!

Now of course if you have checked out our boat you will know that Southwind is hardly a candidate for a family of our size to live aboard and travel the ocean.  So we have been on the search for the perfect boat for our family and we think we have found her, there will be more on that in another post.

We have already been working diligently putting a plan together, selling all of our belongings, and getting things in place for becoming permanent liveaboards.  We have set goals and are working hard everyday to prepare and plan for a journey of a lifetime.  We will be moving out of our current home at the end of September and the girls and I will take a trip to the east coast to spend some quality time with family there.  Once we return we will spend our time prepping our boat, selling off final things like our cars and anything that we didn't sell before and getting ready for a huge journey.

And, if all goes well, we will begin our adventure in the fall of 2016, leaving with the Baja Haha group from San Diego and heading to Cabo San Lucas.  We then plan to sail further down the Mexican coast and in the late spring of 2017 we hope to leave Puerto Vallarta for French Polynesia.

We will be keeping our blog up to date so you can follow along with our progress as we embark on this adventure, selling our stuff, buying our boat and sailing around this great amazing world.  We hope to be able to share the beauty of the people and places we visit, participate in humanitarian efforts along the way, and make a difference not only in our lives but in the lives of others.

Anchors and Fireworks

We were very fortunate that Tom had the whole 4th of July weekend off this year! With his crazy work schedule it is a hit or miss for holiday time off.  The family loaded up the car on Friday and made the 2 hr trek to Chula Vista to get in some sailing on Southwind.  Everyone was really looking forward to this weekend.  The plan was to get down to the marina, install some nav lights on the boat and head out to the anchorage for the day where we could play and then watch fireworks from the bay.

Things were a little more crazy than usual because we had a couple of extra little visitors with us.  We were helping out some friends and watching their two granddaughters for them, ages 18 months and 6. Wow the energy of little ones, if only we could bottle that stuff!  So sailing was going to be a little more challenging with three little ones on board.  Luckily our older girls are super helpful and I had been prepping and planning for weeks in an effort to have things run smooth.

Our visitors had never sailed but were excited about the boat!  We maintained our rules for little ones in life vests at all times, even on the dock! Safety first! The girls did great and everyone had a great (and exhausting) time. The little ones enjoyed paddling around with the big kids in the dinghy and fishing (without hooks). Zoey had fun showing her friends how we do things on the boat.

With a fleet of kids in tow we headed out on Saturday morning to the anchorage at Glorietta Bay.  It was really crowded but we found a spot and anchored without any issues.  Let the fun begin! The kids played in the water, we cooked hot dogs on the grill and then...came the fireworks! We all settled in on the bow of the boat with blankets to stay warm and cozy to watch.  The whole family agreed that this is one of our best Independence Day's yet!


It was a great time had by all.  After two nights aboard Southwind it was time to head back to Huntington Beach.  We are always bummed to have to leave but everyone needed to get back to work. After having two extra little ones on board I have to really say that I don't know how Brittney and Scott from Windtraveler manage with three under three on board full time. They are amazing parents giving their little ones an amazing life! Check out their blog here http://www.windtraveler.net  Who knows maybe we will be joining them in the big blue before long,  Zoey will have to be at least four before that happens! ;)


                              Look at this monkey!