Bob and Linda's bogus journey

We're going sailing for two whole weeks!

30-Aug

Day (-1): A few small repairs, inventory, provisions and waiting for the UPS truck

A few weeks ago before the last six day trip, I noticed a crack in one of the critical fittings on the rig.    I called the nice folks at North East Rigging and asked them to come take a look.   On the phone they told me we really shouldn't go on this trip without giving this some attention.  Fortunately, two days ago, John from North East got on Fujin, hack-sawed the shroud and re-attached it with an extension.  The trip is saved and this should get us through the season.  It does look like a total re-rig of Fujin will happen this winter.  Please click on our ads about 40,000 times to help pay for this.  Thank you.

John sent me this pic of the new fitting with the old cracked one in his hand

Inventory
I was instructed to determine how many boxes of Trader Joes soup (3) and boxes of almond milk (1) were on board.  Also checked breakfast cereal levels.  We shouldn't need to resort to cannibalism again this time.


%^&$&#$ Dinghy
I took the ^&$*%^# Dinghy back to the marina, inflated it, mounted the engine and tied it up last night.  ^%$^#%^$ Dinghy!

Life raft on ice

In early august, I bought a brand new Plastimo Off-shore life raft.   Ideally this should be stowed where it can be grabbed quickly from the cockpit.  Unfortunately, there's no way this thing will fit in and out of the Lazarette so we ended up putting it back in the aft cabin.  Not so great.  It takes up a lot of room and it gets quickly buried behind stuff.

Well, we have this nice big ice chest under the nav table that we never use. We're perfectly fine with our cooler and a block of ice. We have thought about converting the ice chest into some other type of storage space but figured it would hurt the resale value of the boat if we did.   But...the valise for the raft fits down in there.   I put some half-deflated soccer balls in the bottom of the chest and set the raft on top of those so it wouldn't sink so far down into the pit.  It's still not ideal but at least it won't get packed in behind anything else now.  We're hoping to never ever use this $2000 investment!

The Plastimo in the ice chest

Waiting for vital equipment
I ordered two items in plenty of time for this trip.  With one day to go, neither thing has shown up yet.   I was hoping to have our nice new anchor chain and rope rig for this trip.  We currently have 15 feet of light chain and 150 feet of rope.    I had ordered 30 feet of heavy chain and 220 feet of heavier rope.  We may be doing lots of anchoring in this trip and this would have made things more secure.   Hope it comes today or tomorrow.

Even more important was the replacement for the cockpit drink holder which is cracked.  Still no sign of that either


Where are we going?
South.  Just South.    We're leaving at midnight tomorrow night right after my gig with Tsunami of Sound at Johnny D's in Somerville.