Below is a video tour of a SV Estrellita 5.10b - a 1983 Wauquiez Pretorien.

The entire time we owned this boat I intended to do a video tour.  On the day before I flew away from the boat (February 2016), leaving her for sale in Australia, I remembered to take a bunch of video to put together later.

Fast forward 1 year and 4 months later - this week I found that footage while backing up some photos, put it together and narrated it.

The video is a brief overview. Feel free to ask any questions about the boat or gear in the comments below. I also found video from our last passage (New Cal to Australia) which I will process eventually as well. For the rest of our videos, see our YouTube channel.

We answered the following questions after two months of cruising, one year of cruising, and three years of cruising. Often our answers changed, sometimes they stayed the same.

Now, we answer the same questions after one year on land.

What did you love about cruising? 

Carol: Many things. First of all feeling like I was on a real adventure. Doing something that just a handful of people have the courage to do. Discovering the planet. Away from the tourist traps. Being able to share everything with Livia. Experiencing the unexpected - spending a few months in a house in Tahiti was a surprise. Obviously, we met some great, genuine people.

Livia: I've said this before but I felt like my everyday life was embedded in nature. Almost every day I was outside for large sections of the day, I admired the beauty of my natural surroundings, I soaked up the vibe of the non-human world. I miss that in my current life. You don't have to cruise to have this, as many people living in gorgeous natural surroundings can attest, but I don't experience that daily soaking up of the natural vibe right now.

What did you dislike about cruising? 

Livia: Almost everything I dislike about cruising is a result of how we chose to cruise and so these are the downsides to the upsides we actively sought out. We wanted to be remote which meant we spent a lot of time doing without (this was easy) but our non-remote time was a mad rush to get everything bought and fixed before we went remote again. This was exhausting because we were usually very active when we were remote and then very busy when we were non-remote and over the years this began to feel exhausting and relentless. And yet, we could have chosen at any point to spend more time in those population centers and thus had less stress on that front but I would choose the same again.

Carol: Sharing anchorages with the charter fleet, the big rallies, and cruise ships. I felt it was ruining the vibe, the place, because the kind of people those things attract. With that said, obviously we met some awesome people in those groups too, and bad single cruisers, but in the big picture. I disliked being on guard 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - it can wear you down and it was a relief to let go of that.

What do you worry about? 

Livia: When I think about being on land, I worry about not getting back out vagabonding again. When I think about cruising again, I worry about the commitment of owning a boat and what other travel opportunities I will miss out on. When I think about vagabonding by land later, it seems inconceivable to me that I wouldn't go back out cruising. Basically, I am a (high class, first world problem) worrier who has FOMS (Fear Of Missing Out Syndrome).

Carol: My fear right now is to start again too late and to have the wrong expectations either because I forgot the bad about last time or because the world is changing and it will be different.

What (if anything) do you wish someone had told you before you started cruising? 

Carol: It's the opposite. It's more what I wish they didn't tell me - what they said at boat shows when they were trying to sell me something and they were totally wrong. I wish I had met some of the people we met out cruising - but that we met them before we went cruising - to have a more open mind about cruising. With that said, it was a good thing I had a great wife that kept my mind open and didn't follow the crowd.

Livia: Cruising is whatever you want it to be and anyone who starts talking about "real cruisers" is automatically suspect to me. Usually those kind of people will define real cruisers in seemingly opposite ways (e.g., they cross oceans and see lots of countries but they spend a long time in one place and deeply experience the culture). Cruising isn't an attitude either. Avoid defining it, experience it, make it yours, do it your way, and respect that same variety in others. The fact that we all do it differently is part of the joy for me and I wish we would allow for as many differences between cruisers as we allow for differences in the cultures we visit.

What are you looking forward to? 

Carol: Looking forward to getting back to more control over our time. We're doing a lot of fun stuff now but it will be nice to when we get back to a place where we don't have to answer to anyone else except Mother Nature, ourselves and the rules of the country we are in.

Livia: We just spent several weeks climbing outside of Las Vegas in a beautiful area called Red Rock Canyon. It was gorgeous and we met up with some friends there. I'm looking forward to going back in a few weeks.

Favorite place recently was 

Carol: Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas. Because of the type of climbing we were doing it felt like and adventure and I felt back in control of our day. We did what we wanted to do when we wanted to do it.

Livia: Terrebonne, Oregon. Love the vibe there, met some great people, hung out with some old friends, and the climbing at Smith Rock State Park was very fun.

Least favorite place recently was 

Carol: Nowhere.

Livia: Weirdly enough Italy. We met up with good friends there and thoroughly enjoyed our time with them and the rock climbing we did together, but the trash, the dirt, the aggression, the drugs...not a favorite place.

A lesson learned is that...

Livia: The mentality I adopted when cruising has transferred fairly easily to my life on land. I notice the beauty in my environment more no matter where I am, I pay more attention to people and make more eye contact, I take my time, I explore, I avoid trying to change others and to appreciate the differences, and even though I was more of an "activities" than a "things" person before I left, I am even more so now.

Carol: To not let the fear of the future stop you from doing what you love. That it is good to have goals - obtainable, achievable goals.

Best gear award goes to... 

Carol: Our Toyota RAV4 V6. Also, SAS Planet - it was a game changer for people who like to scope out new spots and kite spots.

Livia: I am going to answer these gear questions related to the boat although I'm tempted to say "the dishwasher" from our current home. The best gear that we had while cruising was our boat. We chose a sturdy boat that sailed well and we chose a boat we could easily afford and which left a lot of money in our kitty for upgrades and customization. All of those things decreased the stress and suck factor and increased the fun factor.

Worst gear award goes to... 

Livia: Honestly, the worst gear toward the end was also the boat. She was the perfect boat for us when we set out but 5.5 years later we felt cramped living in her, cramped entertaining in her, and as we became better sailors we felt we could safely handle a little less sturdy boat for a little more performance.

Carol: Having a manual windlass for people like us who explore a lot, going to nook and cranny anchorages where we had to drop multiple times to be set in the perfect spot, or when we wanted to move for a short time, became a nuisance.

What is something that you read or heard about cruising, that you didn't find to be true? 

Carol: What gear you need because in reality it all depends on you, your boat, your activities, your comfort level, and where you go.

Livia: I often read that the transition back to land was traumatic for people and for me personally, it wasn't. Cruising has its own schedule demands, its own work demands, its own social/community joys and dramas and I find being back on land to be different but with the same issues. I found selling the boat traumatic, but not ending the cruise. I was excited to do something new again. I also heard a lot about how cruising gets you into great shape and while that might be true for someone living a more sedentary life on land who suddenly is cruising and active, for me who had been very physically active on land, I found it tougher to stay in shape while cruising.

What is something that you read or heard about cruising, that you found particularly accurate? 

Livia: People were always saying "Go, you'll never regret it". I'm sure some people do regret it, I'm sure some people probably shouldn't go, and I haven't asked everyone I know. Still, I feel like the overwhelming majority of people I have become friends with who have gone cruising - even the friends who didn't particularly like it all of the time, who stopped earlier than they expected, who came back to land broke - don't regret having gone and cherish memories from their time out.

Carol: You can go with any kind of sound boat and you don't have to wait to have the perfect boat. Any boat you go with will cause some limitations.
What question do you wish I would have asked you besides the ones I've asked you and how would you answer it? 

Please ask us a question in the comments of our blog. I promise to respond.

As recently published on the Interview With A Cruiser site:

After a five year hiatus, the Interview With A Cruiser Project is coming out of intermission.

I am toying with different formats, mulling over the question bank, reaching out to my contacts, and thinking through the project from top to bottom.

Here is your chance for input before the project gets up and rolling again!

What did you enjoy about the project? What did you find lacking? Did anything annoy or frustrate you? If you could run the project, what would you do differently? What subjects fascinated you? Which subjects weren't covered enough?

Comment here, on the IWAC post, or on the same topic on the IWAC Facebook page.

//This post refers to events from February 2015 when we were land traveling in New Zealand, having left SV Estrellita in a keel pit in Fiji. I had originally written this for a non-blogging purpose, never did anything with it, and so am posting it here.//

More than 150 pilot whales were stranded on the beach and the call was going out for volunteers. Like many cruisers, we were using the South Pacific cyclone season as a chance to tramp and car camp around New Zealand. While the pilot whales were struggling on the hard, we were snug in our sleeping bags at a hippy rock climbers campground at the North end of the South Island of New Zealand, about 45 minutes away.

After an unusually noisy early morning in camp, we unzipped our tent to find the climbers campground was deserted -- an incredibly rare event at that hour. After asking around we found out about the stranding which had occurred the previous evening. When we arrived at the beach, we were happy to see a large crowd of volunteers.

Believing that there was no need for additional help, we went to the beach just to observe. Several tide cycles after the stranding, there were still about 60 whales on the beach and quite a few were already dead. A baby whale and its mother were still alive. The mother was struggling under her own beached weight while the baby was splashing in a trench dug around its body.

We came upon a team of people caring for a whale they had named Emily. The volunteers were cold, wet, exhausted and in need of relief. They gave us instructions on how to care for Emily and we spent the next several hours carrying buckets of cold water to cool her overheated core, keeping her upright on her belly to avoid crushing her pectoral fins, and talking to her to calm her breathing and to keep her from panicking.

Emily was severely blistered from the sun. She kept her eyes tightly shut against the drying air and blew fiercely in intervals out of her blowhole. One of her pectoral fins had lost a deep slice of skin from her struggles before she was rolled onto her stomach by volunteers. She had been draped in an old white sheet to protect her skin from further sun damage and to hold the cooling water against her.

I will never forget my turn at her head, crouched down in the wet sand at her side near her eye, talking soothingly to her. She had rolled slightly and we were trying to right her. We had sandbags to keep her propped up and in good position for the upcoming high tide but sometimes the sand would give, or she would struggle and start sliding to one side. While we were righting her, trying our best to avoid her badly blistered skin, her breathing had become more jerky, with the breaths coming closer and closer together. You could feel her pain and fear. As I began talking soothingly to her, she gradually slowed her breathing and began taking full, even breaths. I had calmed her and that realization connected me to her in a way that I will remember forever.

As the tide approached, surging in quickly on the long flat beach, the volunteers without wetsuits scurried back across the muddy tidal flats to higher ground. At this point, the difficult task of keeping the whales calm and in place until they had enough water to swim safely began. The Department of Conservation used special floats to first bring out a whale that they believed was a pod leader in hopes that the lead pilot whale swimming offshore would encourage the others.

New Zealand's Golden Bay has a long history of whale beachings. Although scientists are still uncertain as to the exact cause, the preferred explanation is that the long sloping beach combined with a large tidal range confuses the echolocation of the whales who cannot get a solid radar return on the low angle slope. The pilot whales come in, the ebbing tide rushes out and they become stranded. With up to 8 kilometers of tidal flats at Farewell Spit, even if stranded whales refloat on the next high tide, the long shallow beach causes the whales to have difficulty finding their way to deeper water and they often find themselves stranded again.

At sunset, when all of the surviving whales were floating just off the sand, the wetsuit volunteers grasped each others' cold, salty hands and formed a human chain to direct the whales away from the shallows and into deeper water.

Emily swam away. The Department of Conservation experts assured us that whales can recover from such grievous injuries to their skin. I hope so. The next time we are on passage in the South Pacific, sailing between island nations, and we are surrounded by pilot whales, as has occurred several times in the past, I am going to toast Emily and hope she and the rest of her pod always stay in deep water.

Back in Fiji

Island time is a concept that most of us are familiar with. It is a weird concept because it links a bunch of very different people, living in very different cultures, to a single vibe. On the other hand, most people that have traveled in the tropics would agree that there is something real to it.

I haven't spent enough time in enough countries to hazard a theory as to the origins and probably most explanations are nothing more than guesses.

Still, island time has seeped into me, deep into my core, and changed me in a way that became starkly apparent as I re-entered North American culture. I've thought a lot about this and tried to get to the heart of my change. I believe it is this.

I no longer worship efficiency.

In North American culture, it is an article of faith that busy people are important, that managing your life to pack more things in is desirable, and that idle time is wasted time - or at least only to be allowed occasionally, in a scheduled manner, as an indulgence.

We are so strident in our belief that being efficient and busy is the ultimate life goal, that we get angry at anyone who makes us less efficient, who causes us to waste precious minutes. These slow people are disrespecting our schedule, disrespecting the busy lives we lead, by failing to properly adhere to rules of maximum efficiency. They are too slow, in the wrong lane, asking the clerk a question - all signs that they are not among the efficiency faithful. How dare they?!

Now, step back and imagine a culture that values quality over quantity, a culture that does not worship efficiency, but rather richness of experience.

Rather than the slow person being in the busy person's way, this culture sees the busy person as being incredibly rude for trying to force their rush onto other people, as being flawed for trying to do so many things at the same time that they feel they must sacrifice the quality of their interactions and their experience. These busy people don't say hello when they walk into a store, get upset when things don't appear instantly - all signs that they don't understand how life should be lived. How dare they?!

That is the head space I am now inhabiting. I refuse to value someone else's packed life* more than my purposefully unpacked life. I'm not trying to slow them down, or get in their way, because I'm not a jerk, but I'm not going to jump/hurry/apologize to accommodate their rush either.

I force myself not to get mad when other people try to rush me. It's a cultural difference and my internal culture has changed. I even feel a bit bad for incredibly busy people which I know is a bit judge-y - particularly because I know that I am still rushed by island standards even if I am slow by N American. I try instead to be amused by the lack of eye contact, the lack of presence caused by screen obsession, the people who walk underneath the happy clouds without noticing them.

Efficiency is overrated for this hedonist.



*For most people I know, the packed life is chosen, but of course if it is truly forced on someone like a single Mom with a couple of jobs or whatever, then just like the islanders I have met when I was in trouble, I will go out of my way to help.

Because we were done :)

While we were leaving French Polynesia we realized that we had about the same amount of fun left in our cruise as we did money in our bank account. In about 3 or 4 years, depending on how many things went wrong, we would need to head back to land to replenish both our fun factor and our savings. We also knew that our various qualifications in our previous careers were evaporating and so it was a good time to think about returning to work for that reason as well.

At that point we decided we would start keeping our eyes open for work that was both fun AND lucrative. We also decided that if nothing had come up within two years we would start looking for work that was fun OR lucrative and in about four years we would start applying to be greeters at Walmart!

Within the first year we had a number of possible opportunities that were both fun and lucrative, some of which dissolved, one of which suddenly came to fruition. Thus, it was on a high that we were able to finish our cruise - still having fun, still having money, but seeing the end of both in sight.

One of the most interesting things about finishing our cruise is the variety of responses we have had to our stop. The friends who know us the best tell us they are looking forward to seeing what we do next. Many of our cruising friends understand why because either they have finished their own cruise or are seeing their own sense of completion and ending in sight.

The weirdest part for me though are the number of people who see finishing our cruise as a failure or a tragedy of some sort. I think that there is a strange assumption that when people set out cruising, it is forever and that when the cruise invariably ends, that there has been a failure to achieve a goal. I know a few people who are trying to cruise forever. I also know people who desperately wanted to continue cruising, but have issues that cause them to stop (health, money, etc). So, I get it kind of - some cruising finishes are not what the person cruising wants, but the vast majority of cruisers I know are out "for as long as it is fun" or for a finite period of time that they have in their minds even if they don't voice it publicly. They aren't out forever.

Photo by Ryan Lewandowski

We set out on an open ended cruise. We were "going cruising" and we would stop when "we were done". We had no idea what we would think of cruising when we took off, or what specific number of years that cruising would continue to be fun.

Toward the end of our cruise, we were both ready for a change. We were having fun cruising, but we were ready for some other types of fun.

With our years of cruising experience, with the new knowledge of what type of cruisers we actually were (rather than the type of cruisers we guessed we would be from the dock), we were ready also to change boats. Our boat was the perfect boat for our level of experience when we departed, for our ages at the time, and for our first cruise. It is unlikely our second cruise, if we take off again, would be on the same type of boat. We've changed in many ways.

RV CLIPTAKE in Ten Sleep, Wyoming

A summit in Smith Rock, Oregon

I am in a car (a car!), towing a small fiberglass trailer (a trailer?), in the open prairies of Saskatchewan (what?!), and I'm sobbing.

They say that the two happiest days in a boat owners life are when you buy your boat and when you sell it. Six months ago I left Estrellita 5.10b floating at the broker's in Australia and I knew I was saying goodbye. It was a sad moment, that I marked carefully in my mind, as I motored away from her at sunrise across a glassy calm bay in our dinghy loaded with luggage filled with all of the bits and pieces that were our possessions. Carol was already back in Canada working and I had finished my pre-sale prep and Estrellita was a gleaming beauty. I said goodbye, shed a few tears, and boarded my shuttle.

Now that the boat was selling (while we were on a climbing road trip of course), I expected to feel relief and I did. While the boat was still for sale I didn't feel like I could truly close the chapter. I had a million things I wanted to write about but felt like opening a conversation would be too painful while she was still for sale. She sold, and I felt relief that I could move on.

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

I didn't expect to feel such tremendous sadness. I thought I had said goodbye when I left Australia. Yet when she was actually selling I felt deep loss, a physical wrenching in my chest. I had a very real relationship with this inanimate object and that relationship was ending - we were breaking up and it tore at me even though I knew it was the right thing to do.

I also didn't expect the lightness and sudden freedom I felt. I recently read a blog post in which the author spoke about how the commitment of cruising closes off other options. This resonated deeply with me because as Carol and I discuss our long term future plans, when I think of cruising again, at the same time that I reimagine the delights I experienced on the water and in the islands, I fear losing the mountains again. Right now, even though we are in the prairies we are taking regular road trips in our wee trailer (RV CLIPTAKE) and my life has been full of peaks, of forests, of rock to climb. For all of the joys she gave us, boat ownership is a tremendous responsibility, and by choosing cruising we said no to many other ways of vagabonding and of living.

Carol (front - left) & Livia (back - right) summiting a Flatiron in Colorado

I have more odds and ends to say about finishing our cruise. I'm also going to be converting the sailing blog back into travelogue format. I'll be posting much less regularly, but our Giddyup Plan doesn't end with SV Estrellita 5.10b.

It's up! Here is the 7th video in our “A Taste of…” cruising video series. A taste of the places that we’ve explored.

First, we posted tidbits from our time in the Marquesas, then the Societies, then traveling backward in time to British Columbia, then Tonga, the Gambiers Islands, the Tuamotus, and now, A Taste of New Caledonia.

One of our favorite places.*sigh*

((UPDATE: Estrellita has been sold.))

The one, the only, SV Estrellita 5.10b is for sale. Details and contact information can be found here at DBY Yachts.

This is a happy time and a sad time at the same time. We are excited about our plans and the successful completion of our cruise and we are very sad to say so long to our beautiful girl.

The true hero of our voyage has always been and will always be Estrellita.

I will write more eventually about our reasons for completing our voyage, but the short version is that all is well, that we will be returning to Canada and to work, that this blog will over time reconfigure back to its namesake (The Giddyup Plan) and that our vagabonding days are on pause, not over.

In the last 5.5 years we have sailed from Victoria, up to the Haida Gwaii and then down to Mexico and over to Australia. What are our passage NUMBERS?

In those 5.5 years, we have spent 136 nights at sea over 45 passages. 

Data by passage: Of the 45 passages, 22 (49%) of those passages were single overnighters between anchorages and 9 (20%) were two nights. We made 7 (16%) passages between three and five nights and 4 (9%) passages between six and nine nights. Only two passages were 10 nights long and 1 passage – Mexico to Marquesas obviously – was 26 nights.

The data show that most of our passages were short one to two night hops and only 15% were passages of six or more nights. But this is a bit misleading when you want to know what the average night at sea might feel like. What was the most common

Data by night: Of the 136 nights at sea, 34% of nights were spent on passages of 10 days or longer and 18% of the nights were on passages between 6 and 9 days. This means that more than half of the nights we spent at sea were part of “longer” passages of 6 or more nights. 23% of nights were part of 3 to 5 day passages, 16% of nights were on single overnighters and 7% of nights were on two night passages.

If I want to know what most passages were like, I can easily say “short”. But when I think back at my nights at sea, so many of my memories are from our long passages, where the night watch had become part of my daily rhythm and I was starting to enjoy that time.
As an aside, twice we left on a Friday and we were *gasp* perfectly fine. We actually tried to leave on a Friday the 13th but the weather never cooperated.

Our first anchorage and one of our favorite was Athol Bay near Taronga Zoo. It was packed, and full of party boats on Saturday night, and had the normal amount of Sydney daytime bumpy wash, but it was beautiful and full of the sounds of zoo animals at night and in the morning. On one side of the boat I had the jungle and on the other side a postcard perfect view of Sydney Bridge and the Opera House.

We anchored out at first but there was such terrible anchoring techniques in display, with people putting out 1.5:1 scope and backing up at 4 knots, that we thought we had a serious risk of having our anchor pulled up by another boater. So, the day we were planning to leave the boat all day we moved to an available mooring after breakfast. Thanks for the beers Kate!



We spent our longest stretch at Blackwattle Bay, right in the heart of downtown, near the Sydney Fish Market (but not too near if you know what I mean). It was excellent. The anchorage was busy but with everyone cooperating worked out well. One local boat of dubious character drifted away in the middle of the night in a bit of stronger wind without its owner aboard and was impounded.

The Fish Market no longer has a dinghy landing as the piers have been condemned and so we used the Rowing Club and several other public jetties conveniently located on park land bordering the anchorage. A great place for a run and we took full advantage, as did a huge number of runners and dog walkers. It was easy to walk to downtown, or to take all kinds of public transit to wherever you wanted to go from there. We spent days just wandering about downtown, letting ourselves get a little lost and accidentally find new neighborhoods which is how we accidentally went to the Lord Nelson Brewery. While we were in Blackwattle we had a great seafood Christmas lunch/dinner (more on that later) and took a trip up into the Blue Mountains (more on that later).



Farm Cove is where we spent our amazing NYE. Dinghy access to shore is normally easy with a jetty near the Opera House. This is closed on NYE so do your booze run the day before if necessary! We heard that you can get big fines for taking a dinghy up to the wall and climbing over it. So if you do that, maybe don’t admit it.



Our last anchorage (it counts as half because we were hardly there) was an Spring/Manly/Little Manly Cove and we arrived, went into town for ice cream, and enjoyed the view from the cockpit but didn’t do much else here as we were bound the next morning up to the Pittwater area.

In sum, we could have easily spent another month in Sydney, enjoying the city. We probably would have alternated between the harbour anchorages which are lumpy all day as a wash builds up from the gazillion boats but fades at night, and then moved to Blackwattle/Rozelle when we wanted some flat non lumpy time. It’s a great town for boaters.

How much did our Pacific crossing cost us in fees for entering and exiting countries? Time for a NUMBERS post!

Important background: We are 35’ with two people aboard and no pets. We spent four seasons in the South Pacific between 2012 and 2015.  I am counting the cost of all required things for entrance and exit, even if the money doesn’t go to the goverment because I’m counting how much it cost us. We made some choices that other people don’t have to make. We didn’t visit all countries. Fees have changed over the years (particularly in the Cooks) so YMMV.

In sum: If you aren’t interested in the nitty gritty, the most we’ve paid in fees for clearances was for Australia, with Mexico coming in a close second.  The least we paid in fees was for New Caledonia where we paid nothing. Most other countries were in the approximately $200 range.

Country break down: All of the below are listed in the approximate USD cost.

Mexico: $400 USD buys a lot of cheap tacos! At the time of clearance in 2012 we had to pay a little over $110 for our TIP, $40 twice for fishing licences, and $210 for Mexican liability insurance (required by the govt, paid to a private party, despite our having other insurance). This would have allowed us to stay for quite a while (I forget how long) but we left after 6 months.

French Polynesia: We paid about $200 for an agent so we could avoid the bond. If we had been willing to risk the ups and downs of the currency markets and also getting our bond back in CFP at the end of our stay, this amount could have been zero, but I think our choice was fairly representative. If you count our return to Canada for our long stay visa, this would, of course, be the most expensive country on the list, particularly if we included airline tickets in our estimate of the “cost” so I’m just considering our first run through the country which was more normal.

Cooks: We paid a total of about $300 - $50 to clear in Suwarrow and then about $250 in various fees to exit.

Niue: It is a little difficult to decide how to categorize Niue. We only spent $54 in fees but you essentially must take a mooring which adds another $10 per day. Depending on how long you want to stay (and are able to with the exposed anchorage), this could become costly.

Tonga: We spent $183 in Tonga for three month stay. The clerance was inexpensive but after one month the visa ran about $30pp/per month.

Fiji: We paid $180 for all of the standard fees including visa extensions for our more than 4 month stay.

New Caledonia: No fee! No bond! No exit fee! …but you only get 3 months as a N American.

Australia: We paid $450 for two visas and the quarantee fee. Granted, they give you a year but holy crap!