I have always shared Stel’s zeal to live aboard a boat with one condition – that it involved consistent movement across the water. The greatest joy of living on a boat is the adventure of moving from one beautiful waterfront location to another. This simple, but challenging lifestyle can offer a daily opportunity to see new places and meet interesting people as you move from one anchorage or marina to another. The alternative of being stationary can feel a bit constraining and frustrating, especially as we have seen hundreds of other boats passing by. But, with prayers for patience, productivity and opportunities for new friendships, we have learned to approach every new morning with a more positive attitude toward marina life. I am not sure there is another alternative while we wait for our fuel tanks to be replaced. Whether it has been a day of boat projects, visiting the marina laundromat, grocery shopping, site-seeing in our rental car, visiting a new church or going out to eat with cruising friends, we have stayed extremely busy and enjoyed just about every minute of our extended stay at the Atlantic Yacht Basin.

We have included a few pictures of our marina surroundings, a trip to Hampton to see old friends of the family, a trip to Ft. Monroe and to the Newport News Mariners Museum. Our new fuel tanks are now receiving a few coats of epoxy paint and they will start installing them tomorrow, the 20th of May.

During our visit to the Mariner’s Museum, Stel and I read this quote written on a placard in front of an old, but beautifully restored, Chris Craft cruiser. It made us smile. I hope you enjoy.

An auxiliary cruising boat is without question the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man – a home that is stable without being stationary, shaped less like a box than like a fish or a bird or a girl, and in which the homeowner can remove his daily affairs as far from shore as he has the nerve to take them. Here the sprawling panoply of ‘The Home’ is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky.

– E.B. White “The Sea and the Wind that Blows”