Nice thanks Matt where are you located? Stoked to hear you’re on your way to living this way. It’s incredibly rewarding and liberating. Weather is definitely a big contributor to how easy this lifestyle is.
Discussion
I'm based in Portsmouth in the UK - I brought my girl after a fire destroyed my first boat.
She then go dragged off her mooring during a bad storm and slammed on the beach among a number of other boats - you can still see her stuck there among several boats part way through the clean up, on Google Earth. It took 6 months for a tide big enough to lift her. She took damage all over, including her underside, as she'd been dumped over a partially submerged and buried engine block people used to use to tie off at the beach.
Then, just as I was getting her up together, she got hit by another storm, on Jan 2nd this year, and was smashed against the beach again, damaging even more stuff. That was fun, wading in to 6 foot waves, in the face of the wind and rain, in the middle of winter, to grab one of the emergency lines on the starboard side, wheel her around and tie her off to the beach. That took about 10 of us to save her.
Reading through that, it sounds like I've not had a lot of luck so far 😂
I also have a share in a smaller yacht which I use for practice and pottering around, so far no issues with that one 😂
The plan was and is, to be semi nomadic, to sail slowly around the UK, exploring the various coves and harbours around the coastline, then eventually get her over the Europe and down to the med.
Given my luck that pod of angry killer whales will probably sink me when I get there 😂