We travelled across the continent for a couple of months, , traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer along the way because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies forward to the boatyard in Florida.
Camping with 3 kids wasn’t bad, really, a lot of work but a lot of teaching opportunities.
When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure.
We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat it, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats.
It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the bloat important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to bee overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits.
I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education.
It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed.
The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.
Camping with 3 kids wasn’t bad, really, a lot of work but a lot of teaching opportunities.
When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure.
We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat it, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats.
It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the bloat important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to bee overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits.
I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education.
It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed.
The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.