Isn’t life a trip; how one morning you can wake up in one place and the next be almost 700 miles south. How that first morning you were in a spot that seemed inescapable, like you’d never get out of there, then 24 hours later you’ve transported someplace familiar yet fresh. Wednesday awoke with firs and pines and Thursday, practically the exact opposite, gave rise to hay fields and palm trees.

Snowden/Acme Rd.

Napa Valley Boatyard

6 a.m. “Beep… Beep… Beep… Click.” The sound of shuffling feet towards the bathroom and a hand hunting for her glasses on the nightstand fill the darkness. The last time she’ll touch that nightstand, the last time he’ll shuffle his feet on that floor.

Moving day has begun.

The sun meets us at the property. Slowly heating the overnight dew on the ground, in the trees, and off the boat. Like the steam rising from my coffee cup. Weeks of packing, years of building, countless hours of waiting all lead to this moment. The sound of a powerful engine chugging up Snowden road.

A smile fills Garrett’s face. It’s here.

David, with Associated Boat Transport, hands Garrett a radio and armed with a plan he backs up the colossal truck down towards Rediviva. Be it nerves or coffee our hands shake with excitement… no eagerness… no suspense. I need a better word! One to sum up everything; a word to describe the indescribable. Passion:

 I’ll take it, something big is happening and neither of us can wrap our mortal heads around it.

So, how does the hydraulic truck work?:

First off it’s really cool! Second, it’s really the trailer its self that’s hydraulic. With air-bag suspension and hydraulic arms that release the weight off our stands and hold her in place during transport. Having built the boat on a “slight” hill we ended up using the arms quite a bit. This process really made Garrett’s dreads stand on end.

This is one of the three hydraulic arms on either side of the trailer

Garrett and David discussing the best “game plan”

 The trailer can lower practically down to the dirt. This was really useful because as you can see the aft end of the keel is way higher than the bow (so that the boat was level while building) but she couldn’t very well sit on the trailer with her tail sticking up like that now could she….

On the sides of the trailer, if you can see the square holes, long beams are slid in which the boat will rest on during transport. Preferably no other blocking should rest between these beams and the boat, to keep her height low while on the road. We just had to lower her butt down a good 3 feet to make that happen.

So the tedious task of lowering her inch by inch (block by block) down to where she lays keel flat on the trailer began. This is where the arms were a key player. David slowly moved each arm independently while Garrett ran around the boat removing the spacing blocks one at a time. Being careful not to remove too many too quickly just in case the boat slipped (a fail-safe.)

One last block to remove

!Success!

All that was left was to get the masts next to the boat on the trailer and strap everything down tight. By this time we were approaching evening and the scales were closed. So we couldn’t get a final weight on the boat (which was required for legality reasons) so we kissed Rediviva goodnight and told her we’d see her when she arrives in the Golden State.

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I don’t know what was harder loading the boat or saying goodbye to friends

We packed Swabie up and leaving only our tracks in the dirt we said a final farewell to the Gorge. Paid our last $1 to cross the bridge, merged onto the interstate highway, accelerated to 60, and traveled south.

(Seeing as a full week has passed since our truck date and I had yet to write up much about it I took some advice to split up the transport story in order to get it to y’all sooner 🙂