Move-in day, July 3rd, a day that will live in infamy.  At least for the Harris Crew.

Before reading any further, be prepared that this post isn’t all sunshine and margaritas. I’ve done my best to keep it real and include the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it was mostly ugly. Here’s how it went down…

Our original plan was to do the move in two stages.  First, a trip at the beginning of June where we moved anything we didn’t need to finish up the kids school year in Milton, followed by a second trip the first week of July where we brought the last few things.  The first trip was intended to give us a chance to organize and store a lot of our stuff, figure out what obviously wouldn’t fit, unearth some of the initial problems we were pretty sure we’d encounter, and give us a month to sort out anything critical before moving on board for good.  Well due to a couple time overruns on some maintenance work that needed to be completed before launch (see “When One Thing Leads to Another”), trip #1 had to be cancelled.  On top of that, our plan to rent our house furnished blew apart when our original tenant backed out the first week of June.  We ended up finding tenants we liked even more; however, it meant renting unfurnished and storing, distributing, or disposing of all our furniture in the space of a couple weeks which definitely wasn’t in the original timeline.  So we ended up with no choice but to go all-in on a single, rip-off-the-bandaid, do-it-all-in-one-shot moving trip after muscling out all our furniture all in the last 2 weeks of June.

For this special kind of torture we were oh so fortunate to enlist my brother-in-law Kyle, who would use his pick-up truck to pull the trailer that had been sitting in our driveway for the past 2 weeks being filled with our stuff.  As it turned out, we needed every bit of that space (see Megan’s post here).  We had packed the trailer with our dinghy (suspended from the ceiling thanks to Kyle’s great suggestion), outboard, 12 Home Depot moving boxes full of our life, life jackets, tools, our shiny new boat mattresses, stand-up paddle board, and a bunch of duffle bags full of clothes.  Phew… to say Megan and I were tired after packing up and loading all that into the trailer is an understatement.  But then came everything “else”.  After all the paring down of our belongings, the kids had some special toys they planned to bring.  We had a box of small electronics and all their various cords (go pro, laptops, handheld VHF, Garmin InReach, etc.).  We had a couple boxes and a cooler bag of food to get us started on arrival.  We had all my diabetic supplies (will post specially on this at some point in the future).  And then as we looked around the mostly empty house we had worked so hard to clean out, we were still left with all the stuff you just don’t know what to do with so you jam it in a drawer to be dealt with “later”.  Well “later” had arrived and by the time we were ready to lock the door and drive away from our home in Milton, it was 11am on Tuesday, July 2nd.  After some emotional last minute farewells to friends we were finally on our way.  Exhausted, sad, questioning our decision, more than a little fearful about what was to come, and with 3 kids acting crazy jammed across the middle row of our Pathfinder, we left Milton on the 10 hour convoy-with-a-trailer ride to Herrington Harbour North in Deale, Maryland.  It was going to be a late night…

Fast forward to arrival around 1030pm and, you guessed it, we sat for awhile in the car waiting out a torrential downpour when all we wanted to do was sleep.  Megan and I were burned out.  The kids were burned out.  I can only imagine Kyle was burned out (he drove behind us the whole way pulling our trailer).  Yet we still had to unpack our mattresses, bedding, and a few clothes, get the basics set up on the boat, and then crash in preparation for the following “real” move-in day.  Just when we accomplished all that and thought we were done, the day dropped its last couple surprises on us.  First, we weren’t able to get the air conditioning running despite our best efforts, leaving us to sweat it out in a boat that had been shut up tight for 2 weeks and in the middle of the summer’s first major heat wave (fun times).  Second, I heard a suspicious splashing sound on the cabin floor and realized poor Aden was throwing up only 15 minutes after falling dead asleep while still wearing her clothes from the day.  Thankfully she was able to roll over and aim for the floor rather than spreading that Chipotle goodness from 3 hours ago across her newly made bed.  Just as thankfully, Megan is somewhat immune to the smell of vomit which was quickly filling our sweltering boat, so she graciously volunteered for clean up duty while I sat in the cockpit telling myself not to worry because things could only get better from here.

After crashing about 1am to grab a few hours sleep on the salon bench / sea berth, I dragged myself awake to face move-in day for real (Megan and Kyle shared the master suite since they’re both taller than me and the kids slept in their usual bunks).  To try and beat the worst of the heat we started unpacking the trailer and Kyle’s truck by 730am after a hearty breakfast of… nothing.  We worked as quickly as possible with at least one person (usually Kyle, he was a work horse) running loads from the parking lot to the boat and at least one person (usually Megan) scrambling to find places for at least enough of our belongings that there was room aboard for the next load before it arrived.  The third person (usually me) went in between trying to fill the gaps as best as possible to keep the flow moving.  Oh yes and let’s not forget the 3 kids on board who were left largely unsupervised amongst the rapidly growing pile of chaos, one of which put the cherry on top of the morning’s efforts by christening our aft head (that’s the bathroom for you non-sailors) with another round of puke, this time accompanied with a side of diarrhea (don’t worry, Aden said she felt a lot better after that).  Suddenly making sure the heads were fully operational became a big priority given the rapidly rising temperature both inside and outside the boat (no time yet to debug our a/c issues…).

By noon we were all sweating buckets, but had managed to put a major dent in the unloading-and-dump-on-the-boat phase.  Matriarch looked like a bomb had gone off inside with our belongings piled everywhere.  The deck was also littered with some larger items like our sails (rigging them would have to wait several days), our stand up paddle board, some tools, our boat bbq, some shore power cords, and a few empty boxes from items we managed to put away in the midst of unloading.  In short, our lives turned upside down, shaken not stirred, and jammed into a boat, all done on limited sleep, on the heels of a very emotional day leaving our home in Milton, after a 10 hour drive, a couple puke sessions, in 40 degrees celsius with air quality warnings all over. So we decided a break for lunch was in order and hit the closest restaurant for a sandwich, beer, and many glasses of water.

After lunch we got back to work clearing out the last of the items from the trailer, Kyle’s truck, and our Pathfinder.  Given another evening of storms was in the forecast, we also needed to make sure anything that couldn’t or shouldn’t get wet was moved off the deck and inside.  By 5pm we were on to our last task of the day which was to getting our dinghy out of the trailer, inflating it, mounting the outboard, and getting it in the water and over to our slip.  Kyle and I were on the case and managed to lower the dinghy from its suspension to the roof the trailer and get it out and onto a dinghy cart we found in the boat yard.  So far so good, but like any boat job it wasn’t as easy as we hoped.  As I pumped air into the inflatable tubes I noticed what I thought was a small leak in the pump hose; however, as the air pressure increased the sound of escaping air increased along with it to the point where it become impossible to inflate the dinghy enough that I felt comfortable launching it with our brand new 20HP outboard sitting on the stern.  After several failed attempts and a call to West Marine which happened to be closing in 10 minutes, I took a long shot at fashioning a makeshift washer out of some spare packing foam that was left over in the dinghy to try and seal off the leak which we had isolated to the connection between hose and valve.  Thank heavens for small miracles it worked!  With the newly MacGyver’d air pump we had the dinghy ready for launch within a few minutes.  After muscling it down the launch ramp and successfully grounding the outboard twice in mud when we launched it stern first at too steep of an angle (guess the water was more shallow than I thought), Kyle and I got it floating and I rowed him over to our slip. Time check - 7:00pm. 

Work was done for the day.  We celebrated with late dinner and drinks then crashed early as there was nothing left in the tank and Kyle needed to be on the road by 730am the following morning for his trip back home.  Thankfully we’d managed to sort the air conditioning issue so Matriarch was mercifully comfortable for sleeping, provided you didn’t sprain and ankle or gash a shin stepping over and around the various piles of our stuff that were literally everywhere.

And so ended move-in day.  Despite all our planning, research, and preparation, it was much, much, much harder than I ever expected, both physically, mentally, and emotionally.  It’s hard to explain what a gut check it is to put your family through an ordeal like this on the hope and promise that living smaller, living closer, and adventuring as a family will be ultimately positive and life improving.  Looking around at our entire lives crammed into the boat with what felt like complete chaos made both Megan and I seriously question what the f&*k we were thinking leaving our perfectly curated and comfortable existence in the suburbs. 

If anyone has that answer feel free to share.