In may, we celebrated our fourth year living aboard Blue Turtle.  I’m a little late posting this because we’ve been so wrapped up in wedding plans and planning/provisioning for our upcoming Dry Tortugas trip. Our fourth year finds us loving the live-aboard lifestyle.  Year four was full of some awesome and memorable trips as well as some long-awaited boat projects.

Last summer, we took our second trip to the Dry Tortugas (where Randy asked me to marry him!) and loved every minute of it. We took several trips to Cayo Costa and visited Franklin Lock and Dam with my sister and nephews and my parents who were camping there. We also had the opportunity to take 2 trips to one of our favorite local anchorages, Keeywaydin Island. We took advantage of the Christmas break to visit Keeywaydin and had a blast spending spring break there with the Tuckers.  We met up with Sea Crazy crew near Captiva on Memorial Day weekend and had several other short weekend trips to New Pass and Matanzas Pass.

Aside from some great trips, we managed to get a few boat projects done. These were long-awaited projects because they were mostly cosmetic and weren’t high on the priority list.  In the spring of 2014, we started painting the exterior of our boat. Since it is a lengthy process, we knew it would have to be done in stages and so we managed to get most of the upper cabin done then. This past year Randy tackled painting the exterior hull of the boat. This made a significant difference in the appearance of Blue Turtle. We still have the interior of the bridge to do, but Blue Turtle is starting to look like a new boat.

We also did some cosmetic updates in the interior of the boat as well.  I had been wanting to remove the old, discolored, peeling wallpaper from Blue Turtle’s interior walls since we bought her 4 years ago. Finally, with all the other major projects done, we were able to remedy this. We first removed the paper and painted the v-birth as our test to see how it came out. Since we were so pleased with the results, I tackled the aft cabin and main salon walls as well.  We are so happy to be done with the ugly stained wallpaper and the paint gave the interior a fresh clean look.

Blue Turtle is starting to look better than ever and just in time for our visit with family for our wedding (in 2 weeks!) and our (hopefully) trip to the Dry Tortugas (pray for good weather!).