This May marks our 5th year anniversary of living aboard Blue Turtle. Hard to believe that 5 years ago Randy and I brought Blue Turtle home and moved aboard to live full time. We were complete noobs and had no idea what we were in for. Everything was a learning process. We joke about the fact that …
Blue Turtle Trawler
Looking for Blue Turtle Trawler content? In 2021, we sold our trawler and purchased a 44′ sailboat. All of the trawler content is still available on this blog. All posts prior to June 2021 are below (and following pages).
Last week we had my sister, Tracy, and nephews, Jack & Ryan, aboard for spring break. Since the kids were all out of school for a full week, our original plan was to head to the Keys and anchor out near Key West to do some spear fishing and kayaking and then head into Key …
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our Disclosure for more info. When Randy and I first decided to live aboard a boat, we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Well, actually my parents were living aboard at the time, so we did have “some” idea: we thought it was going to be all …
This past weekend, Blue Turtle and crew + Corey’s cousin, Nicole, headed to New Pass to anchor for the weekend. Also accompanying us on our cruise was Ned and Beth aboard their boat, All Bright at Sea. Ned and Beth had never anchored there and wanted to tag along to check it out. Needless to …
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our Disclosure for more info. Randy and I were watching a documentary on Amazon the other night about minimalism and it got me thinking about whether living aboard a boat would be considered minimalism. The documentary titled, Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, examines the many flavors of minimalism and …
This past weekend, Shrimp Festival and spring break were in full swing. Shrimp Fest is always a great time to be on our little island of Fort Myers Beach. It’s festive, fun and crazy with spring break happening at the same time. Last year we missed Shrimp Fest because I had just had surgery on …
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our Disclosure for more info. I think the most popular question when moving aboard a boat is “where am I going to put all my stuff?” If you’re like me and don’t like clutter, this can be a challenging question. I recently went through Blue Turtle and completely reorganized a few …
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our Disclosure for more info. **UPDATED** We’ve updated this post to include our 2019 presentation (below). We’ve added a lot more information and images to this year’s presentation as opposed to the previous versions. You can download the updated presentation below. We’ve been asked if our TrawlerFest presentation, Cruising to …
As we announced back in January, we were invited to give a seminar at TrawlerFest in Stuart, FL on “Cruising to the Dry Tortugas”. Two weeks ago, we gave the same seminar at the Yachts Miami Beach show as part of Passagemaker Magazine’s CruiserPort free educational boat seminars. While the Miami show was a lot …
We’ve received several comments and questions about what our thoughts are on a single engine trawler vs. twin engines. Many folks have questions about the maintenance and operational costs as well as safety and redundancy. This topic of single vs. twin is always highly debated and there are good arguments for both sides. There’s a great article …
This weekend we visited Miami to give our very first seminar as part of PassageMaker Magazine’s CruiserPort at the Yachts Miami Beach show. CruiserPort offers free boat education seminars and Randy, Corey and I were invited to speak about our experience cruising to the Dry Tortugas. Before our presentation on Friday, we met up with Peter Swanson, …
I’ve always loved touring the insides of boats. When we were shopping for a trawler, we would try to crawl around every interior possible to get an idea of what style and layouts we liked. I also love to see how other cruisers solve space issues and decorate to make it feel like home. We’ve been …