I had alluded to the possibility of us needing to move the boat away from this marina due to infrastructure work that was coming up. For a lot of reasons, that would have been a pain in the butt. Well, we dodged that bullet.
Karen worked her network of friends here, masterfully, and managed to secure us one of the very few spots left for a boat of our size. Yesterday we moved the boat out of the way of the construction, and settled in to our new, temporary home on the other side of the marina.
Project Status
We continue to work hard on projects that are not immediately critical, but might just be lifestyle enhancing (like our air conditioners!), or cosmetic and/or value adding to the boat (like refinishing our saloon table). The big, and important, job left is replacing the standing rigging.
The wires that support Harmonie’s mast are now 14 years old. With one circumnavigation on them, they were on our schedule to retire next year, for their 15th birthday. Unfortunately, the need to find a new insurance company requires us to push that ahead to this year. We have pulled the trigger with the local rigger, the parts have been ordered, and assembly started. By the middle of this coming week, they will be going up and down the mast replacing wires.
In the past couple of days, we got our boat speed transducer up and running again, our space all prepped for our new air conditioner so it can just drop in when we pick it up on Monday, our flexible propane line to the stove replaced, the rudder shaft repacked, and a bunch more things done. Karen has been scrubbing her fingers to the bone getting weeks and weeks of boatyard dirt off the deck. For an older boat, she really sparkles.
Also coming up this week is the big Miami Boat Show. In the last few years this show has shrunk dramatically as a sailboat show, but it is still huge, and all of the major suppliers and manufacturers are there with their latest and greatest toys. We have a couple of things we need to look at there to evaluate for future projects, and a few things we’ll be shopping for–if we have any money left after this busy refit season!
Insurance Update
Insurance evaluation continues to take a lot of time. Over the past several years the marine insurance business has been roiled by higher than normal losses. Many companies have left the business, or greatly restricted the scope of policies they will write, so we are hardly unique in needing to re-shop something we thought we had sorted out.
We now have two policies in the running. They have different pros and cons, and quite different prices. Both touch down on the right side of most or all of our most significant issues. Once we get everything assembled we’ll post our thinking on this.
fetchinketch 
Interested in your insurance evaluations. Brava (SM2K#400) is USCG documented with home port St Thomas USVI. Currently in Greece, and plan on sailing the Mediterranean for the next two years. Have not heard about renewal from Pantaenius US yet but hearing about a lot of cancellations from others.
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Frederick, Here is a quick summary. We found the best policies we have seen so far to be from Novamar, and the Jackline policy by the Gowrie Group. But they are quite different. The Jackline policy that was quoted to us is a worldwide policy. There are exclusions, but generally speaking they are not places we would want to go anyway! The downside is that the cost is about 3% of the hull value.
The Novamar policy uses “cruising regions” to adjust the rate depending on where you will be. The only rate we have seen so far is USA East Coast, including the Bahamas and the Caribbean Sea. That is running about 2% of hull value.
Both policies require the boat be out of the “hurricane zone” for the tropical storm season. I am guessing finding year round coverage for named storms in the Caribbean these days would be almost impossible.
Depending on where you’ll be based in the USA we found the policies from Gieco to be good, and they included the Bahamas. They aren’t much use for long range cruisers, however.
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