We wish you peace and joy this holiday season and all throughout the new year. This past year has seen a lot of changes for Cathy and me. For us the biggest change was that it was the first full year we have lived ashore since 1987. We moved into an apartment here in Brunswick, Georgia at the end of November, 2001, and in April of this year we moved across the complex to our current lake-view apartment. It didn’t really take much getting used to—the hot showers and cold drinks, cable TV and climate control, full standing headroom and walk-in closets were much easier to adjust to than when we moved the opposite direction from shore life to boat life back in 1988. Even now, after more than a year ashore, we still marvel at the fact that water just pours out of the faucet unendingly, and that we never have to fill the water tanks!
In an attempt to pay for this sumptuous lifestyle, I started work for St. Simons Transit Company last February. The Company runs boat tours from St. Simon’s and Jekyll Island—Georgia’s “Golden Isles”—on 40-foot pontoon-hulled motorboats. As the captain with the lowest seniority I worked a good bit as first mate, but in April I officially had my first command. On my maiden voyage as a professional tour boat captain we managed to rescue two adults, a child, and a dog from a boat that had swamped in Jekyll Sound. Later that same day Cathy happened to ride along on the tour boat, and (after watching my paid but inexperienced first mate) she decided to give the life of a professional mariner a try, too. She has been first mate on many of the roughly 425 trips that I ran this year. Our most popular trip is a 90-minute nature tour focusing on the bottlenose dolphin which frequents this area. We also do educational trips for school children, where we drop a trawl net and then explain the catch. Occasionally we will carry private groups on water taxis or other special-purpose trips.
In our “spare” time when we have not been earning money, Cathy and I have been tending to our own boat, Sovereign. This year we sandblasted and painted the areas on the deck where rust had started peeping out, and Cathy re-varnished the entire interior. We are almost done re-varnishing the exterior teak, and Sovereign is looking very pretty again. Everything has taken so much longer than we expected, but we are nearing the end of our labors. Unfortunately, one of the adages about boat work is that when you get done with everything then it is either time to start all over again, or to sell the boat. We don’t have the energy to start all over again, so we think we will be putting Sovereign up for sale in the near future.
In September Cathy started taking classes from H&R Block to become an “Income Tax Professional”. After a lot of class time and studying, she managed to pass the course first in her class with a 99.3% average. (She’s still berating herself over that last 0.7%.) In November I passed the road test for a Commercial Driver’s License so I can now carry passengers not only on the water but to and from their land destinations as well.
Aside from these few activities, we haven’t had time to do much else. We are on-call virtually all the time for unscheduled boat trips, so we can’t really travel out of town. But we have really been enjoying this new phase of our lives that lets us be on the water every day (and even get paid for it), while retiring to our comfortable little apartment each evening. We are still trying to figure out how to earn enough money in this uncertain business to pay all the bills, but so far the financial difficulties are about equally matched by the rewards of this lifestyle.
We hope that you are also enjoying the rewards of life. May you all have fair winds and calm seas throughout the coming year,
Jim and Cathy Mueller