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Kotona
- Author David Vaughn
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E31 Independence
A Pump Tale - Grandpa would be pleased.
When I was a kid, some of my favorite times were when I got to help Grandpa with a project out in his garage. He was the head of equipment maintenance for our local utility company, and could fix just about anything. He taught me some of that. He also taught me something else. Having raised...
E31 Independence
Sunrise / Sunset
Early morning, late evening. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference from a photo. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference in life.
Dementia is perhaps the worst way to leave this world. Little by little, one loses one’s self well before one loses one’s life. At first it’s just...
- Featured
E31 Independence
A New Home
It’s been five months since we learned of our parent’s diagnosis. We’ve dealt with many changes in that time. Obviously the biggest change was our parent’s move to a long-term care facility. As we’ve visited over the last few months, there are good days and not so good days.
Another big change...
E31 Independence
Signing Off, For Now
We've been quiet for a while. Oh, things have been happening; just not things on the boat. Life, as it sometimes does, has thrown in a course change.
Fall was upon us, hurricane season was over, and as we made preparations to cast off on the southbound leg of our journey, we frequently saw...
E31 Independence
Quiet. And Disquiet.
Pickwick Lake is the last of the Alabama portion of the Tennessee River, on its western end. It’s a lake that we’re unfamiliar with, but it will be our new cruising grounds for the next few months at least.
We’ve been here a couple of weeks now, but the weather hasn’t cooperated with our...
E31 Independence
Wait. A few dam minutes.
The Fourth of July has come and gone. For many, it seems to mark the middle of summer. Of course in the southern states, summer weather lasts well into September. But from the level of boating activity at Joe Wheeler State Park, the morning of July 5, you might have thought summer was over. We...
E31 Independence
And so it begins...
was one of my favorite lines from Babylon 5, one of my favorite science fiction shows. It set the tone for something new, something different, without letting on how that something would turn out. It was just a beginning, but things were now set in motion, and something (or many things) was...
E31 Independence
Sometimes it's the little things...
Every boat is a compromise, but a boat you're going to live on for perhaps a couple of years at a time, needs to feel like home. Fortunately for us, our E31, inspired those feelings early on. Still, as we prepare her systems for our planned retirement cruise, we've made a few little changes to...
E31 Independence
A Word of Tanks.
One of the biggest joys of boat ownership is when you start a project thinking “well this won’t take long”, only to be reminded “Dude, what is wrong with you? This is a BOAT!”
So it was with our plumbing. It started as “the toilet doesn’t work”. Well, that wasn’t really a problem; we wanted to...
E31 Independence
Deck Port? Deck Prism? Whatever it’s called, I fixed it.
One of the endearing things about our E31, is the number of quirky but very useful things that we’ve found as we get to know her. Like the bronze rods that extend from the cabin, under the cockpit, and fit through holes in the side of the lids of the cockpit lockers, locking them securely...
E31 Independence
Another Step (and un-step)
You know that saying “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”?
It’s on all sorts of motivational swag. It’s not wrong, of course, but it’s a bit incomplete. ‘Cause regardless of the length of the journey, the first step isn’t enough. You gotta keep moving to get where you’re going...
E31 Independence
First Night
As one whose profession required quite a bit of travel, I never really had a problem sleeping in a new place. There were times when I had a different hotel room every other night, before flying back home late Friday, to start again on Monday. But being retired from that for a couple of years...
E31 Independence
My boat sang to me…
Warning: Anthropomorphizing and metaphors ahead. Continue at your own risk. You’ve been warned.
On my first visit to the boat that would come to be named Kotona, it wasn’t the lines, or the styling, or the gear that got me. Those were all great, but it wasn’t that, or really anything else...