Departure Day

It's June 1st, at 6:30 in the morning and it's blowing 30 knots. Wait! Well, it was blowing 30 knots a few minutes ago, and it's still forecast to blow 30 knots, but it's only about 10 knots at the moment (see the picture). Kathy and I spent a quiet night on the boat and we're sitting here drinking Starbucks instant coffee. Not bad. We are expecting Bill to arrive any minute now with all the frozen stuff, at which point will commence the fire drill to get it all stowed, with dry ice, in the refrigerated locker. We will then seal the locker with packing tape and we won't open it for about two days. As the anticipation to depart builds, I'll just mention that we successfully connected our GPS to the computer and now our position reports will be semi-automated. I still have to fill in all the weather data, which you will not see on YOTREPS, but the lat and long, and course and speed, will be filled in automatically from the GPS data. That's a big help; manually copying your position and course from the GPS, and then entering the data into another screen, is somewhat error prone. Speaking of GPS, ours says that the Golden Gate Bridge is 2073 nautical miles away. Meanwhile provisioning has been a massive job. Donna and Kathy went to Costco on Saturday and bought enough stuff to fill eight big plastic totes. Some of it went to live in Kim Ickler's freezer for a few days, but most of it came here to the boat. Since then, Kathy has been sorting and labeling everything so that meal preparation, while still a lot of work on a heeling boat, will be at least simplified by not having to look all over the place for ingredients. Well, I think Bill is here so I need to get back to work. Stay tuned, and fair winds. ~~Chris