Have Another Day's Great Loop

We leave in about six weeks.  Sometime in the last four or five months that just snuck up on us.  It has been so far off for so long that it was always just sometime in the future.  It’s starting to get a lot more real.  Last week we sold Laura’s car in preparation for being gone a year.  The week before we got health insurance since our coverage ended with my final departure from Schwab.  Now we’ve begun in earnest identifying what we don’t have on the boat that we need to live on it for a year and what is on the boat that we don’t need to live on it for a year.

Mechanical preparations continue.  Things seem to be breaking at about the same pace that I’m fixing them.  The radar is with Raymarine being repaired, a trim tab fell off the boat, the Seakeeper has thrown some random errors, the starboard engine has been hesitant to start a couple of times….  ahh boat ownership!

The installation of the Seakeeper was a great thing for our boat.  Our boat affords us a great amount of living space but at the expense of it’s ability to deliver a steady ride in all sea conditions.  The Seakeeper has improved those bad manners a great deal.  Unfortunately it’s also made our already stern-heavy boat a good deal more stern heavy.  I’ve spent much of the spring and early summer trying to get the boat to sit right in the water, run with the same efficiency it had before the install and generally absorb the weight.   Thus far those efforts have included some prop swaps and tweaking.  Now I’m working on moving around some of the water tanks in order to move some weight out of the back of the boat and into the front.  Additionally I now have to replace the starboard trim tab that fell off the boat after breaking the sheer pins on its mounts.   This is likely because of the additional forces placed on it due to the additional weight of the stabilizer in the stern.

So the preparations continue, soon we will start provisioning the boat and making some test runs.  One of which may include running down to the lowest bridge we will encounter on our trip.  This bridge is 19′ 10″ while our theoretical clearance is 19′ 8″.  Fortunately it’s close enough to us to be a one day run to go down and test that we can make it under.