New year, new boat, new name

Even though she's for sale, she wears the gold flag.
She earned it.

Oh, so much to cover here. 

I remember this time last year how overwhelmed I felt. We owned a boat, something we've never done before, and planned on doing a 6000 mile voyage, something few have done before. For the first 2 months of the year I remember thinking, "Are we really going to do this?" Because I didn't think, in all honestly, we would. And yet.

We bought another boat. It's exactly the same as Cat-n-Dogs -- both Endeavours, 40 foot, with 315 Yanmar engines. However, this new boat is, well, newer. 

A glimpse at the new boat, inQuest

It also offers a fully enclosed pilot house, in lieu of a fly deck like on the old boat. That became key to us for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the enclosed pilot house (also called "the sky lounge" -- ooOOOoo) eliminates the need for a 2nd helm. CnD had 2 helms, one upstairs on the fly deck and one in the inside for inclement conditions. It was in the center of the boat, and raised a bit so you could see out the windows in front. But anytime you went from the salon to the staterooms, you had to step up and over the helm. Add to that slick floors, and you had a scary situation for a couple of older dogs. Not to mention older people.

She gets her name

Also, after the gulf crossing (with Russ being stranded on the fly deck) we think the ability to move up and down inside the boat would be useful. (Hopefully we never encounter those kind of water again, but we weren't suppose to then, either.)

Okay, so it's still a catamaran so why the new name?

Both our dogs are older. One is 10, the other 12. It's just a matter of time before one leaves us, then every time we get to a new port someone will ask "why is it dogS" and then we'd have to explain what happened and I'd burst into tears.

All those birds are pelicans! It's sunset, and
they're settling in for the night.

To spare myself that we decided to pick a new name. We had a couple of ideas. Wasabi was one. ReBoot was another (we really liked that one; kind of a starting over thing and a tech thing). Then we realized we owned the domain inquest.com FOREVER. Really. Like the beginning of the internet. inQuest. We will be in quest of the next thing, whatever that may be. So it seemed perfect.

We're here in Longboat Key in our own slip while we do mostly the same upgrades and modifications we did to Cat-n-Dogs. With any luck we hope to be back at it by the end of January. We'd like to (finally!) make it to the keys for a few weeks, then head up the other side of Florida. 

Mostly, we'd like to be traveling with our buddy boat, As You Wish, when they cross their wake.