Once we arrived here in St. Augustine and got somewhat settled in our new surroundings, we turned our attention to the topic of becoming “legal” residents of the state of Florida. We’d done a fair amount of research on this before leaving Maryland since our situation was complicated by the fact that we intended to continue living aboard our boat for the foreseeable future and would not own any property in Florida. The main issue is having to enter a single “physical” address on all the state government forms when we know we’ll be moving the boat around to different parts of the state and possibly to the Bahamas. We knew other cruisers had successfully accomplished this so it wasn’t a fool’s errand, but there was also no state sanctioned set of instructions on how to proceed. To make it a bit more daunting, we heard horror stories from some other cruisers on our trip down here on how inhospitable the state of Florida has become towards live aboard cruisers. As a result, we expected this to potentially be a long and likely frustrating process.

We began this process back in August, about a month before leaving Maryland. While most of our mail correspondence is now conducted electronically, there are still a few entities that have not or will not divorce themselves from paper mail – government agencies primarily. As you can imagine, this mail problem exists for a number of lifestyles, (RV’ers, traveling doctors/nurses, some businesses, merchant marines, etc.) not just boaters. The best advice we got on how to deal with this was from a seminar we attended at the 2015 Annapolis boat show. At that seminar we were told about a mail service in Florida called “St. Brendon’s Isle”. For a modest monthly fee, this service will provide you with a physical mailing address in Florida at which you can receive both letters and packages. Upon receipt of any mail, the service will send you an email letting you know you got something. You then go login to your account on their site and can view a scanned image of the outside of the envelope to see who it’s from and decide if you want them to hold, shred, or forward it to your current location. For a small upcharge, you can also request that they open the letter and scan the contents. Then you can read the contents online and take any necessary action. Cool! The key here is that not only does this solve the paper mail problem, it also provides that all important Florida physical mailing address we needed. We immediately switched over to this address with our bank and other “official” institutions so that we’d have in our possession several pieces of mail addressed to us at a Florida address before we even started the residency process here in Florida.

One other advantage of the St. Brendon’s Isle service is that they provide a lot of very helpful information about how to navigate the residency procedure in Florida, most particularly the correct sequence of events that must occur to avoid frustration. Here’s all the things we needed to do:

1. Drivers Licenses
2. Boat registration
3. Dinghy registration
4. Car registration
5. Fishing Licenses
6. Record official change of Domicile (Tax purposes)
7. Voter registration

The first of these, which turned out to be the easiest, was the car registration. We got rid of both our cars before we left Maryland (sold one and donated the other) and arrived in Florida “car-less”. We knew in advance of arriving that the first thing we needed to do was get a car. Since we did not have to “transfer” an existing car registration to Florida, our new registration was created from scratch with our St. Brendon’s Isle address right there at the car dealership. The next step was the boat registration. When we originally bought our boat we had it federally documented. While federal documentation does not exempt you from state registration, it makes the process much simpler. Also key here is to have proof that either a sales or excise tax was paid in full on the boat at the time of purchase. Thus armed with a valid Florida car registration, boat documentation papers and proof of taxes paid, passports, and items of paper mail from banks to our Florida address, we headed to the Florida department of motor vehicles.

Unlike in Maryland, the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles handles both cars and boats together. Having spent many frustrating hours in the Maryland DMV over the years, we were prepared for the worst. Upon arriving, we were giving a piece of paper with a number and asked to sit and wait. We barely got to our seats before our number was called (we’ve sat in the Maryland DMV waiting for our number to be called for upwards of 3 hours!). The woman who helped us could not possibly have been nicer. She was also expert on what we were trying to do and zipped through everything very quickly. We came away after a little more than an hour with new Florida drivers licenses and both the big boat and dinghy officially registered in Florida. The best part is that the address on our drivers licenses is a combination of our boat’s documentation number and the address of our mail service. We can now relocate anywhere we want in Florida and our license information remains valid.

Right after that, we got our Florida change of domicile forms notarized (we needed our new Florida driver’s licenses for this) and then submitted those forms to the county clerk’s office who stamped them and gave us a receipt. Then it was off to Walmart to get our fishing licenses which, again, required our new Florida driver’s licenses. We got all this done in one afternoon and are now official residents of Florida! The only thing on the list we haven’t done yet is register to vote, which wasn’t a priority since the big election just happened (we voted absentee in Maryland this time around). All in all, this went amazingly smoothly and we were super impressed with the “can do” attitude of all the state and county officials we encountered.