We have always heard that actually leaving the dock is one of the harder parts of this life, but I somehow thought it wouldn’t apply to us. We’ve already made so many big moves in the pursuit of our dream, and it’s not like this dock is our dock, it’s just the one we picked to make moving aboard more convenient. But now that we’re here, it’s hard!

We splashed our catamaran Zia back into the water just before Thanksgiving, after 2 months in a boatyard. After a few stressful moments trying to get off that dock, we motored down to Morehead City Yacht Basin, where we still sit. So why haven’t we left yet?

• It has taken us way longer than expected to move aboard. Even after getting rid of SO MUCH stuff, we still had way more than little Zia can handle. It’s tough to find space for everything, and just as tough to continue to purge when we really have no idea what we will need in this new life ahead of us.

• Speaking of space: trying to fit house-stuff into a boat-space situation is very much a round hole, square peg situation. We’re not used to the types of storage spaces Zia has and they’re not compatible with the storage boxes and baskets of our previous life.

• We have to sell our van. This one has been so hard for me specifically. Not only do I love our van (honestly, vans are the literal best family car and I will fight you on this) but selling it represents cutting our last tie to a normal life. With our van, we can decide we want Chick-fil-A for dinner. We can make another last minute grocery run. We can drive to the beach or a park when the kids are stir crazy. We could probably pack all our stuff back up, drive back to Mooresville, and beg for our jobs back. While I recognize that we are ultimately trading land mobility for water mobility, cutting this last tie feels huge.

• Lastly, weather. This is not a great time of year to be on a boat this far north. (Who knew?) The weather offshore is unpredictable, with storms blowing down from the north more frequently than we’d like. It’s also cold, making standing night watch out in the cockpit at 2AM downright dangerous without our proper winter gear, which we foolishly left at my parents’ house thinking we wouldn’t need it in the Caribbean. There have been nights where I couldn’t get warm in bed with four blankets on top of me, I can’t imagine trying to keep warm out in the wind and 50 miles offshore. Which leaves us with the Intracoastal Waterway, but motoring by daylight hours only on the ICW is a very slow way to travel, not to mention logistically complicated with tides and unmarked shoals and bridges that only open at certain times. Needless to say, we will not be in the Bahamas for Christmas like we had told the kids.

So those are the reasons we’ve been slow to leave this place. However, the plans are set! We’re waiting on some last minute math curriculum to come in today, (note to self, next time give the kids their placement tests before placing the order) but once we have those in hand we should be free to leave. The van should be sold by the end of the day. There’s some fog rolling in that may delay us by a few hours tomorrow, which will make us miss the Onslow Bridge opening and add a day to an already long trip. But plans are in motion!

If you’d like to follow along with our adventures, we also have an Instagram page called SailingZia where we post more frequent updates and pictures. Come join us!