We're Given KEYS To A BRAND NEW Sailing Catamaran!

We're in Florida and this is our new boat. Well, kind of. But how did we get here and what happened to our boat? In the last few days, we sailed from Newport, Rhode Island to New York City, down the Jersey Shore, up the Delaware Bay, through the DNC Canal, and down to Annapolis. A total of 250 nautical miles. And if that wasn't enough, when we got there, we were met by a tropical storm. Literally, the streets of Annapolis flooded. I could literally take my dinghy down. Then we packed up what feels like our entire boat. Literally everything. To jump in a car, drive a thousand miles south to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where we're picking up our new boat. We're Cole and Emily Cruz, a couple of 30-something-year-olds who refused to wait to retirement to live our best life. So we did what any financially smart person would do, quit our jobs and bought a boat. We're one year and 6,000 nautical miles into our mission to sail the world, and we're super excited to take you along with us. Speaking of, we've got a lot to do to get this boat ready to leave the dock. It's so crazy to believe that we are already back here in Florida. It feels like we literally just left. Does anyone else feel like time just goes by so, so, so, so fast these days? Or is it just me? Oh my goodness, she's so beautiful. I'm so excited. Guys, I'm gonna sit this down right here. This is a 2023 Leopard 42, and she's gonna be our home for the next week or so. Oh my goodness, we're so excited, and we are taking her from Fort Lauderdale to the Annapolis Boat Show, where she'll be on display for all to see. Hey, we're gonna be on display too. What? Yeah, at the YouTuber's booth. At the YouTuber's booth. Yes, we will be at the YouTuber's booth, and we're also gonna be daily vlogging the show, so we hope you'll come along and join us there. This boat is absolutely stunning, and even though it's smaller than our boat, it's a Leopard 42, there's so much space and storage space. I can't wait to get unpacked and put everything away in all the ample storage spaces. It's something I've talked about several times in our videos. I love for everything to have a home. When you live in a small space, things just get even smaller when there's a lot of clutter. You know, when we were looking for our boats, we went to countless boat shows. We're on a Leopard 42 at the St. Pete Boat Show. The Leopard just seemed to really stand out to us for the fit and finish, and it met all of our needs and what we were looking for. And as I walk around this new 42, I'm reminded of that because this boat's no different. One of the things that is super important to know is that this is a brand new boat, so it's never left the dock, and we're just running through all the mechanics, starting with the generator. We're gonna fire up the engines, get them up to temperature, check all the fluids, and just make sure everything is up to snuff before we leave the dock, because this is so different than anything we've done before. When we left the dock with our 2016 boat, she was proven, right? She has crossed the Atlantic. She's, you know, seven years old. So just making sure everything is good to go before we leave and running through all the systems. Let's offshore one. Yep. Okay, you can see what happened immediately. Since we're the captains of this vessel, it's important for us to go through and do a safety check as well as a mechanical check of everything, making sure that all of our fluids are in the engines, the sail drives, the generator, checking all the through holes. Going through, we need to make sure to check the life raft. We need to check all of our fire extinguishers. The gamut, really. Just go through the entire boat and make sure that everything looks great. If there's anything that is questionable, we need to get in touch with the Leopard team here while we have the ability to do that. We actually just had one of the team members from Leopard drop off some spare parts. I mean, we're talking about a 900 mile passage on a brand new boat. I mean, this is basically her shakedown sail. So we want to make sure before we leave the dock, we're really covering all our bases. Holy cow. I am so jealous of this. There's so much room. Are you serious? This is the 4JH45, which is the exact same engines that we have on our boats. So I'm pretty familiar with them. Look at this! Look at this space! We're both in the engine room. Go ahead and go in. Hold on, there's more room. There you go. Look at this! Oh man! So one of the biggest things we don't like about our boat is the engine rooms are so, so small. And if you got to do any work in the engine room, well, it's not fun, but it's especially even more not fun when you're under passage and you're trying to squeeze into a tiny engine room and figure out what's going on, which has happened twice to us already. All right, where are the paper towels? First things first, I'm checking the sail drive oil and obviously it's nice and clean. We're gonna wipe this off, put it back down and make sure that our levels are correct. Now I'm going to check the engine oil. Engine oil is clean and at a perfect level. What are you laughing at? I'm just laughing because I'm obsessed with how much room is down here. For reference, we're using a 16 millimeter lens and you can see both of us in this engine room. It's the little things, it really is. Coolant level is just a hair low on the reservoir, but we've got plenty of coolant in here and I think we're going to leave it alone because it's got plenty in the reservoir. And our sea strainer, our raw water filter is clean. We've got a really nice setup here with the engine fuel filters, as well as the generator fuel filter is on the starboard side. So that looks nice and clean and man, this engine compartment being brand new, there's not a speck of dust in this thing. Gotta love it. Here on the port side, the coolant is a inside to get that and we're going to top it off. So it is good to go, but everything else is looking nice, clean, dry. I'm just going through the motions here on the new Yanmar's. They do have 18 hours on them each. So they've obviously been ran a little bit, but just kind of getting familiar with the system here. This is a little bit different than our boats, obviously newer, and I want to bring them up to temperature. Typically our JH45s run at about 172 degrees at 2000 RPMs, which is our cruising speed. We'll be interested to see what this boat does as far as most economical and as far as the temperature goes, but I'm gonna let them run for just a little while, make sure, check the engines, make sure I don't hear any squeaking in the belts, before making a big trip like this, that everything seems to be good. One thing I'm doing is just checking all of the through holes, checking the bilges, making sure that everything looks good. We need to go through it all and just make sure there's nothing leaking. So one of the things I love about this boat is the working space here. I could easily switch out any of these pumps without having to be upside down and working on them, so that's really nice. Checking our through holes, notice that this little filter is nice and clogged with just some normal debris, so we're gonna go ahead and clean that out and replace it. We just got the paperwork for the boat and met with the team one last time, but we're ready to hit the sea. Just one last little stop at the fuel dock, top off our water and we'll be good to go. All crew, all crew, please report to the salon for your safety briefing and weather. This is my favorite part of the video, we get to introduce our crew. We have crew! Oh my gosh, wow. So guys, Emily and I are super excited to have Greg and Jen on board to help us with this delivery to Annapolis. Greg and Jen are our first patrons, actually. We met them last year and we're going to talk more about that in the upcoming videos. Strobe. We should change the battery of that. We've got a parachute flare, hand flares. I do have a small med kit. We've got our Garmin handheld, which I keep with the ditch bag. We've got the most important thing, our Eperb, two personal Eperbs. I've got an entire little fishing kit. Gotta keep the bum clean, you know? Don't want to get too uncomfortable. We've got our life jackets. Good old just orange life jackets we hope we never have to use because they're ugly. That's why we don't want to use them because they're ugly? Yeah, I mean, why would you ever want to use those? You know, these are things you don't think about when you are hopping on a brand new boat that's never left port. When we bought our 2016 Leopard 44, it was stocked with pots and pans and cups and bedding and towels and literally everything. We showed up in the middle of the night, we put our bags on and we left. This is something that I guess we didn't totally anticipate. Fresca? Yes, I will share. Do you ever wonder what they actually look at? Like when they grab the receipt, they like use the highlighter and just mark it. Like what is it that they're actually looking at? How does he know? He stacked the water bottles. All right, so the last of it. So as we are wrapping up all of our preparations, we are planning to leave tomorrow and taking another check at the weather, which unfortunately so far as we've been looking is not looking to be very much in our favor. And if you've watched our passage videos from Florida up to Martha's Vineyard, well, we basically got our butts kicked. So we're expecting that we are going to have to motor a lot simply because we have a deadline. And there's one thing about boating, especially sailing, you can't have deadlines. So taking a look tonight and this passage is going to be as good as we can make it. Cole, stop raising your eyebrows at me. All right, so 3 a.m. tomorrow. Remember that bad weather we talked about? We are right in the thick of it right now. We are welding. Right hand corner, starboard corner, front and push. And we lost the drone. Let's see, how do I even open this up? Oh, here we go. I can get in it. I trust this man with my life. So while Cole and Emily are doing the important work, I was working on my craft projects because that's what I do. Emily's bucket. That's what I do. It was actually on. You actually put that out on the radio? It was actually on. If a squash can make you smile. Broccoli, celery, gotta be vegetables. Wow. All right. Anyways, back to the weather we go. Didn't want to do this trip alone, so we reached out to Greg and Jen. You're doing great, babe.