Sometimes Home is not a House

Terry Brewin, of Montclair, New Jersey, in January 2020 began planning an unusual retirement.
The business owner-turned-school teacher has lived in Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Minnesota, even Liberia, but thought she’d like to live somewhere next to the water. The 66-year-old couldn’t afford to buy a house on the water and with climate change, that might prove a bad long-term idea anyway.

Then she saw a picture of a houseboat and “something triggered,” Brewin said. She got the idea to buy a boat, fix it up over a few years, and then live on it in her retirement. She could sell her investment home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to help pay for it. One of her nine brothers, who lives in Lancaster, was with her at the time and did not dissuade her.

“My family’s always supported my wild ideas,” she said. “I’ve been a little unconventional.” Brewin at 25 started her own cleaning firm, grew it to employ 30 people cleaning houses and businesses.

“My family’s always supported my wild ideas,” she said. “I’ve been a little unconventional.”

She got married, divorced and never had children. She started teaching high school art in her 50s. So she checked out some houseboats and made up her mind to eventually live on one. Next was determining where she’d drop anchor and live. A lake would be too confining; she didn’t just want a floating home. Houseboats could handle rough water so Brewin would not have to be stuck in one place.

‘Am I crazy?’

Brewin extensively researched the best attributes of a houseboat for rough water. Catamaran-style? Fiberglass, steel, aluminum? V-shaped bottom? In February, she saw two Carri-Craft boats for sale on the Boat Trader website and drove to Maryland to see one of them.

“I got obsessed with this,” Brewin said. “It became a quest.”

“I got obsessed with this,” Brewin said. “It became a quest.” The boat was smaller than she wanted and the owner of the Alpine Marina in Alpine, N. J. urged her to “go for the bigger boats.” She put a $17,000 offer on a 57-foot-long Carri-Craft in Charlestown, South Carolina. Its owner was in his 80s and sick and could no longer live on it. Her offer was accepted and after an inspector checked the boat out to make sure it was sound, Brewin bought it. Suddenly, her two- or three-year plan was happening right away. Brewin wanted a project, but now a mountain of work confronted her.
“I was buying a boat and Covid hit,” she said. “Am I crazy?”

It actually wasn’t the first time Brewin owned a boat. Once on a business trip to Fort Lauderdale, the then 30-year-old bought a 21-foot speedboat at a boat show and hauled it to New Jersey on a trailer. She got a half-hour lesson on how to drive it and used the vessel on the Hudson River near Manhattan for about five years, usually launching at the statue of liberty.

Brewin made various arrangements for her Carri-craft in March and April. She hired a captain to take the boat out on the little river near the Charlestown harbor. She paid to get the boat hauled out of the water at the marina so the inspector could check the hull. A mechanic checked the diesel engines and said they were sound, but nothing else worked on the boat.

It took Brewin a few months to figure out how to transport the boat from South Carolina to New Jersey. Trucking the boat north would cost too much because it was 24 feet tall. She got the bottom of the boat painted, the engines overhauled and the fuel tanks polished.

Then she told a friend, “Why don’t we go down and get the boat? How difficult could it be?” She thought she would hire a captain for a day to teach them how to motor the boat and then they could navigate with an app on their phone. A brother from California flew out to go with her but the boat still wasn’t ready. So Brewin, her brother and a friend lived on the boat for a week. It had a working kitchen and bathroom, but “it was definitely roughing it,” she said.

First try

Finally, during the last week of June, they hired a captain and started out. The boat had no power steering, which made the cable steering maneuvering extremely difficult.

“Five minutes into the trip, I realized there was no way in hell we were gonna bring that boat up ourselves.” The experienced captain was barely able to maneuver it out of the docks without hitting the expensive sailboats nearby. But they left the harbor and started up the Intercoastal waterway, or ICW. Captain Larry, a “very interesting Southern guy” Brewin said, only had expected to drive the boat for a couple hours (a three-hour tour?), but then agreed to take it all the way to New York for $300 per day. Dolphins swam with the boat the first night along the Carolinas.

“It felt like the Amazon, in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “It was beautiful. I fell in love with my boat.”

“It felt like the Amazon, in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “It was beautiful. I fell in love with my boat.”

The boat severely fishtailed, as the rudders needed balancing. None of the gauges worked. Brewin had a portable water depth finder but it didn’t function when the boat was moving. They even had to stop periodically and use a dipstick to figure out how much fuel they were using.

Capt. Larry repaired things when he could on the trip and eventually fixed the depth finder. He taught his boatmates how to read channel markers, and put Navionics on their phones to help navigate.
“And we thought we could do this ourselves” was an oft-repeated joke, Brewin laughed.

They spent three days “sneaking” up the ICW at just six knots an hour. Brewin wore her mask in the Carolinas due to Covid-19 and met many retirees who were traveling around, living on their boats.
“My houseboat got a lot of looks. ‘Oh that’s so cool,’” they told her. “It was a showstopper.”

On the third night, a cable popped, forcing them to steer with the throttle. Later, an engine light lit. So, every hour, they had to shoot the engine with a heat gun to assure it was working properly. At one point, one of the two diesel engines started smoking. They dropped anchor and Larry put on a new belt in about an hour. Then the starboard engine didn’t start. Time to call a tow. At 1 a.m. during the July 4 weekend, they were towed to Morehead City, a North Carolina port town, so the cable system and engine could be repaired.

“I had a meltdown,” Brewin said. “I called my sister and told her maybe I shouldn’t do this. She talked me off the cliff.” Brewin drove Capt. Larry back to South Carolina. They’d have to wait to take the boat further. During her time on the water, Brewin was conversing through phone calls and emails with Jeremy Ganse of RE/MAX.

“I’m in the middle of the Intercoastal trying to sell a house”

“I’m in the middle of the Intercoastal trying to sell a house,” Brewin quipped. She bought the house at 324 N. Lime St. in Lancaster city in 2015 as an investment property. Ganse sold it for her two weeks after listing it.

Second try

Three weeks later, Brewin and her friend drove back down to Morehead City and they started north again after the steering system was fixed, the engine was running again, and divers cleaned the bottom of the boat. They anchored out on the water under a beautiful starry night, but the peace didn’t last.
“Quick! Get up!” called the captain. The anchor didn’t hold and they had drifted near a bridge. Thankfully, they did not strike anything. Near Oriental, N.C., the cable for the upper helm of the boat broke, but they continued their voyage. Waves rocked the vessel back and forth crossing the Albemarle Sound, just before they pulled into Chesapeake, Virginia. They hopped through the lock system at the Chesapeake Bay. Later, when they encountered a barge pulled by a tugboat near a marina, their strut broke.

“The strut turns the prop and the prop makes you go,” Brewin explained. They got towed back to a marina, again, and learned it would take two to three weeks to fix the boat. Brewin rented cars, one for her and her friend, and one for the captain, and they went home with no boat.

Third try: Racing a hurricane

At the end of August, they started out again, as Brewin’s return-to-teaching date was quickly approaching. Her refurbished boat “handled and maneuvered like nobody’s business,” she said, but Hurricane Lauren was barreling up the east coast. On Wednesday, the mariners heard the hurricane was expected to arrive near New York and New Jersey that Saturday. Capt. Larry determined they must drive night and day to outrun it. They left that night. Waves grew to six feet during the storms. Lightning lit up Atlantic City.

“I feared for my life,” Brewin said. “I was too nervous to sleep.” Driving a boat at night is difficult but they zipped along with the waves at 12 knots thanks to the new hydraulic steering. Whales cruised near them around Cape May at South Jersey. After a night with just two hours of sleep, an exhausted Brewin reached New York Harbor at 7 a.m. on the last Friday of August.
“The trip was scary, breathtaking, an adventure.”

Making a boat a home

What is the seafaring school teacher’s next project? Brewin is gutting the 550-square-foot boat and plans to spend $125,000 to refurbish it. She will raise the roof, add heated floors and insulate the boat. She will redesign the bathroom and install a fold-up Murphy bed to provide more space for her art studio. Her brothers will use the boat’s 50-foot deck for fishing.

She will spend time near Jersey City, where she can admire the Manhattan skyline. She can dock the boat there for less than $900 a month.

“It’s the best-kept secret how to live in expensive areas”

“It’s the best-kept secret how to live in expensive areas,” she said. It’s less expensive north of the George Washington Bridge and rates across from Manhattan dip from November to April. Ideally, she will stay further north during the peak season and in Jersey City during the off season, when she can visit all the restaurants and Liberty Park.

There is a drawback. Brewin’s 96-year-old mother in New Jersey worries about her seafaring daughter and always says the same thing when she returns to land.

“So glad you’re back.”

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