What a wonderful home she was!
Goodbye, old girl. We hope your new owners love you as much as we did!
Bottom painted in Melbourne
Our last post to this blog was in March of 2010. It is now a year later, and a lot of water has passed under our keel, both literally and figuratively.
We did not dawdle on our way back to Florida, since there were potential buyers wating in Melbourne for us to get there. We took the shortest routes we could plot through the Bahamas, and put in some long days to make up for bad weather days. Fortunately, the weather was mostly good on this leg of our journey.
We made landfall in Miami about April 10, and spent a couple of days there, visiting with our Cuban friend, Dr. Nardelio Nodal. Then offshore again up to West Palm Beach. We ran inside (Intracoastal Waterway) on up to Melbourne from there, arriving April 15.
Once in Melobourne, we worked like dogs, to get the boat in shape for showing. Paint, varnish, fiberglass polishing, oil changes, generator maintenance, etc. etc. We replaced what needed replacing, scraped the bottom, worked on air conditioners, cleaned all sea strainers. If we could do it, we did it!
We had a number of showings to interested buyers, but only one lowball offer initially. Susan flew back to Arizona with Molly, to begin our house search and re-start her real estate business. I stayed aboard the boat to continue with maintenance and keep the boat ready to show. I finally made a two-week trip back to Phoenix in July, and of course, that is when a serious offer came in on the boat.
After sea trial, and spending two weeks in the boatyard to effect additonal repairs that surfaced in the marine survey, we closed the sale on August 10th, three years after buying KINGDOM.
I finished packing our personal gear, arranged for shipping it and our scooters back to Phoenix, and flew back to join Susan.
Except for our Christmas trip to California for Yvonne and Clay's wedding, most of the intervening time from September 2010 until now, early March, 2011, has been spent searching for, purchasing, and furnishing our new home in Phoenix. We finally feel settled again, and are looking forward to the next chapter. It is good to be able to spend time with our families here, though we occasionally do miss our seagoing life.
This will be the last posting for "The voyages of KINGDOM" blog.
