We are now a week from shoving off. All the weddings have been attended, all Best Man toasts given, all of Harmony’s internships and academic prize entries completed, all family camping trips attended, one of the cars has been sold, and the last of our daysail pleasure cruises has come and gone. We’ve said farewell to many friends and family, missed out on many more that we will surely regret, and answered the question, “Where all will you be going?” about six and one-half dozen times.
It’s a little disconcerting how many times I’ve been obliged to say, “We’re not sure, exactly,” over the last two months in response to a wide variety of inquiries. Especially the one that goes, “So are you guys ready?” We will be hosting a shove-off party at Cathedral Park next weekend the day before we leave, so I have a little time to think up some more definitive answers.
Work on boat projects continues around the clock. Harmony is at this moment putting the finishing touches on the dinghy transom she rebuilt (the old one was rotten) while I sit here and drink coffee. This afternoon I’ll start on installation of the electronic autopilot that we bought to supplement my DIY wind vane, which just yesterday tore off its base. After two years of building and rebuilding that little bastard, I’m finally ready to entertain the notion that I am not an engineer and chuck it in the trash.
Aside from these latest tasks has been a flood of logistical and mechanical tasks, including passport renewal (Harmony), retirement plan management, engine maintenance and spare part hunting, a rigging inspection and my very own trip up the mast for lightbulb replacement (not for the faint of heart),
Just another MySpace selfshot from the top of a mast. If I’m honest with myself, one of the main reasons I wanted a sailboat was so I could clamber around the deck like an urgent monkey and someday climb the mast. It was scarier than I thought it’d be.
While in Seattle for a wedding last weekend, we spent a couple hours at Fisheries Supply breathing life back into my Dad’s boat-builder’s account. It was the last big shopping spree before we leave the relative convenience of the PNW. After this, we’ll have to wait until California to pick up any necessary gear, by which time we’ll have already passed through the portion of the sailing journey where we might be most likely to need it.
I have to admit that there is something kind of sexy about a woman who is as willing to spend gobs of your joint savings on boating-related hardware and accessories. I could feel the jealousy radiating off of all the middle-aged men in the aisles as we rolled our laden cart past them.
Unlimited juice? This party is gonna be off the hook.
While there, we decided to hell with it and bought ourselves another damn refrigerator. Maybe it’s because we’ve had so little time to acclimate ourselves to the logistics of preparing meals without dairy and meat products, or maybe all the extra juice from the second solar panel has me feeling cocky. I installed the new fridge in the exact same place as the old one, with the exception that I shrank the size of the icebox in hopes of improving our energy efficiency. This means that the coffee I’m drinking right now has a far lesser chance of instilling intestinal regret, so life is looking pretty good.
I didn’t really have a theme today, other than to record that spirits are high and anxiety is even higher. There’s an undercurrent of excitement in there somewhere too, but for the moment it’s overwhelmed.
We are coming to the end of another life phase – stranger than the one we left behind three months ago, but nowhere near as drastic as the change that is about to occur. This whole preparation phase has been the warm-up. If only it wasn’t so exhausting in its own right . . .