All photos of Beatitude underway were taken on our maiden voyage in September 2012

It has been nineteen months since we first stepped foot aboard Beatitude in Ft. Lauderdale, FL to bring her home to our marina in Palmetto. We have now lived aboard her full-time for 16 months. Our time away from the dock and out on the water has been limited during this time due to my work schedule. I was thinking a couple of days ago, “How often have we been able to take our floating home out and enjoy her away from the dock?”

To answer the question, I turned to our not-so-meticulously-kept log book. As with most things in life, we were much more diligent about chronicling the details of our excursions early on. As time has past, our attention to the detailed logging of our journeys has waned. Nevertheless, I was able to reconstruct a reasonable summary of our use of Beatitude as a cruising vessel.

Here are some raw facts about the time we’ve spent away from the docks with Beatitude:

Time elapsed: 19 months
Trips undertaken: 25
Length of excursions: 1 to 8 days
Total days out cruising: 50
Total overnight passages: 4
Total miles traveled: 1,310
Total miles under sail alone: 224
Total miles motor-sailing: 337
Total miles motoring:749

What do I make of these numbers? They approximated my expectations. I would have guessed we had been out more often (at least twice monthly, rather than 1.3 times monthly). Before doing this little exercise, I told Cindy we had likely covered a little over 1000 miles in our sporadic journeying. I knew we had spent far more time motoring than sailing. This seems to be a truism among cruising families that live aboard sailboats. Hopefully, the amount of time spent under sail alone increases once we spend more extended times away from the dock, but we will see.

Beatitude is not a vessel one takes out for an hour or two sail on the river for fun. She is large enough that one needs a little more room. Since most of our excursions have been out into the bay and back, we spend at least 12 miles each time motoring out of the Manatee River and back. While at times we raise the main and motorsail part of this way, the channel is too narrow and changes direction too often near the mouth of the river to go under sail alone. I’m sure we could do it if necessary, but why do it otherwise?

It will be interesting to see how these numbers change over the next year. In just over 15 weeks, we will leave Regatta Pointe and spend at least 3 weeks/month cruising. Have I told you lately that I can’t wait??