Our current winter home is a 2008 Hunter 44DS sailboat. Purchased in January 2010, it is the first
boat we owned together. We lived aboard at Hotel Coral & Marina in Ensenada, Mexico for six
months and then at anchor in San Diego for three months, outfitting the boat for cruising. In
November 2010 we started cruising for real in Mexico. This boat has been an awesome home and
fantastic cruising platform.
We use a 10' Porta-bote driven by a 6 hp 4-stroke Suzuki engine as our cruising dinghy. This is a
great little boat, although it has some shortcomings because it was not built for constant hard use in
tropical salt water. This page outlines how we assemble the Porta-bote on Groovy's deck and
describes the various ways we upgraded it to work as a cruising dinghy.
The Hobie i14t Tandem inflatable kayak is a wonderful way to get a little exercise and do some
slower paced exploring. It provides a terrifc, stable platform. used it in the fifth wheel, giving us on-
the-water access to lakes and rivers across the US. It assembles quickly and fits in our fifth wheel
basement. We have also found it very handy in our cruising life. We keep it inflated and store it in
Garhauer kayak racks along the outsdie of the boats stanchions, raising and lowering it with a bridle/
spare halyard system.
We installed a solar power system on Groovy for charging the batteries. This was a major
undertaking, not only because the entire system was much bigger and more sophisticated than any
solar project we had ever done, but it required a stainless steel arch extenstion to be fabricated to
support the panels. This arch extension was beautifully crafted and now provides a davit system, a
place to hang on when in the jump seats, and wonderful shade in the cockpit.