Maria standing in the companionway of our first boat!
W
e were now the proud owners of a 1981 Catalina 30 Tall Rig Sloop currently named “Euphoria”. I had a meticulously detailed plan with an hour-by-hour schedule to get her across the Sound, down the East River, up the Hudson river and into her slip in Haverstraw NY and it was time to get down to business – boy, was I in for a rude awakening! Were to start? Oh, that’s right, the engine wouldn’t start… Lesson number 1, it’s a boat! Over the years, we’ve learned to take nothing for granted on a boat - Things that should move, don’t and things that shouldn’t move, do!No worries! We got hold of the broker, hooked up a battery charger and continued on with the business of getting her ready to go. She was in pretty good shape, but there was a lot of “junk” down below (at least by our landlubber standards), so we spent the next bunch of hours cleaning up, organizing, checking thru-hulls, engine oil, coolent levels, etc. – all those books I read and all the info I got from folks on-line was sure coming in handy… if not for them I wouldn’t have a clew! Sorry, couldn’t help myself 
Anyway, one interesting “find” during the process was our genoa nicely folded in the V-Berth! What the heck is it doing there? Time to figure out how to set up our roller-furler; good thing the previous owner had all his manuals in a big three-ring binder! Fast-forward through a lot of head scratching, page flipping and bruised knuckles, at 2:00 PM we were ready to go. I’m still not sure what we were thinking, but we left, only to return 4 hours later after sanity set in and we realized there was no way we were going to make City Island before nightfall.
