Owning a Brand New Catalina 425 - One Year In -- All the Fun We Had

Editor's note:  This is the 2nd part of summarizing our first year with Seas The Day (our Catalina 425).  Our first post summarizes all the issues and warranty experience.  Now we want to point out all the fun we had with her!

It's been a year since we traded Seas The Day 315 for Seas The Day 425.  We did a lot with her during this year, sharing her with friends and family and spending a lot of time aboard ourselves.  I have no intention of rewriting everything... this will simply be a list of our posts along with some links to the full posts so you don't have to search through the index at the right.

(We also had a lull in our sailing this weekend as Vicky's company is busy getting ready for the Chinese National Week holiday.  So she is working both nights and I'm free to pull this together.  We'll be heading to the boat on Thursday for several days of vacation.)

Fall 2019

I started with Orientation, a two day time to get acquainted with all the system onboard the new Seas The Day 425.

Then I had the Delivery Trip, a two day excursion with Captain Gary where we brought Seas The Day 425 from Riverside, NJ down to Rock Hall, MD.  This included an overnight stay in Chesapeake City, MD.

Vicky returned to the USA in early October and we had a celebration and a week's vacation.  (A photo from the celebration part is at the top of this post.)  This included our first time taking Seas The Day out from her new home at Osprey Point Marina (which was captured by Linda, one of our new dock-mates).

We sailed with my colleagues Jie & Tao.

We sailed with my colleague Josh and his family.  This was our first trip south of the bay bridge where we saw the famous Thomas Point Light.

Neve (a colleague's daughter) and her family joined us for a day of sailing.  This time we caught her just at the perfect age wheres she wanted to learn all about Seas The Day and do a fair amount of the work.  (Note to self... we need more guests like this.)

Friends Greg and Judy came out for a day of sailing, including our first visit to Baltimore Light.

We had a weekend with just the two of us (before Vicky had to return to China).

In early November, I had a day of single-handing before it got too cold.  (Let's be honest... it was already too cold, but with all the money pouring out, I wanted to maximize the season.)

Winter 2019/2020

We put Seas The Day away for the winter and tallied the costs.

Spring 2020 

We had a COVID shutdown for most of the spring - limiting me to armchair sailing.

We finally got back on board at the end of May.

My company had a couple of scheduled vacation weeks.  We had our first vacation at the end of May.  During this vacation, my brother and his girlfriend came out for a day and lent some of his fishing gear to Vicky for us to use.  (I was never into fishing as a kid.)

We sailed with just the two of us on a typical weekend.

My son and his girlfriend came for a Father's Day weekend.

Summer 2020

Around this time it became clear that COVID would be with us for the foreseeable future.

We had a great day out on the bay.

Our second scheduled vacation started by sailing with Deb and Nathan and their family.  Our visit with them last year (on a charter aboard Shardana) resulted in us trading up to Seas The Day 425!

We finished our second vacation with a day of sailing with Jie and Tao.

We saw the comet!

We had a quick trip, and our VSC.

Xiaomi (Neve's mother) and her family came for a summer day sail.

We had some more days with just the two of us.  We saw some pirates! And we had a nice late August weekend.

We cleaned our Anchor Locker.

We celebrated Labor Day Weekend by sailing with my boss, Jim, and his family and also with Judy and Greg again.

We had quick day sail.

And finally, we had our first cool-weather day of sailing for this season.

And that's all we did.  

We will tally up all the expenses at the end of the year after all the season's costs are in, but I expect "George's rule of thumb" to hold.  For a new boat, take the mortgage payments for the year and add 50% to get a rough total budget.  My guess is we will come in a tad under that $45K budget, but not by very much.

For that we had 14 days of sailing in the Fall of 2019 and another 25 days sailing so far this season.  While we didn't track the number of nights we stayed onboard last fall, this year so far it was 33 (yes, we had a number of days where we stayed onboard and didn't sail).  We shared her with 23 others including friends, family and colleagues (some of them multiple times).

Was it worth it?  Absolutely!  First, this being COVID summer, having Seas The Day 425 and keeping her in a marina where it is almost always comfortable to stay has allowed us to "extend our bubble" so to speak (spending weekdays at home and weekends onboard). We have been very careful of who we share her with and our trips down and back are carefully planned to avoid any exposure.  Outside of the time we spent aboard, we have been staying at our home.  So even with all the issues we had, owning her has been a tremendous blessing.  

But I have to say the biggest blessing is having Vicky "trapped" here in the USA with me for the summer (and reluctant to face the quarantine if she goes back to China).  It made for a very fun and enjoyable time.