The premise behind the 1992 movie, “Captain Ron” bears some similarity to our own situation. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that my husband has just finished sailing our newly purchased St Francis 50 from Fort Lauderdale to Bradenton.

Fortunately, for us, we had the help of a former St Francis 50 owner, Dave (O’Vive). Dave has far greater credentials than the hired skipper, and layabout, Captain Ron, played by Kurt Russell. Dave has 40 years’ sailing experience, and has done two Pacific crossings, having sailed to Australia. He is also really a nice guy.

Prior to departure, Dave and his wife, Nathalie, went through our boat with a check list to ensure that it was ready to sail. They did this while they were waiting for my husband’s morning flight to arrive.

But, the boat was left in some disorganization when we took ownership. So, there was a stressful moment when Dave and my husband were about to dock the boat in Bradenton, and discovered that the boat hook pole was missing. They found the pole, just in time.

Because docking is something that I suspect stresses many a newbie sailor, I really enjoyed the docking manuevers scene from “Captain Ron”. I love how the background music is totally out of step with the stress aboard the boat.

I believe my husband and I have actually had conversations that smack of the sparkling optimism of Martin Harvey, the straight-man and inexperienced boat owner, played by Martin Short. He tries to convince his wife that they will learn to sail, especially now that they actually own a sail boat.  But, unlike the Harvey family, we are actually taking RYA theoretical and practical sailing training courses.

And, like the Harvey family, we have a boat that has some issues to sort out. For example, our Iridium phone has gone missing, the fridge door fell off en route to Bradenton, and the AC works, but only on the port side. With the fridge door, I suspect that it might have been removed by my husband, rather than just fell off. My husband likes things to work properly and he’d have had no tolerance for a fridge with idiosyncracies.

That said, SV Aphrodite is an absolutely beautiful boat and we are really looking forward to living aboard. I document the refits that we are planning to do in my previous post called, “Planning and budgeting for sail boat refits“.