Ever since I left the GIRI I've wondered if I remembered everything that one is supposed to do before leaving a boat in dry dock. There are a myriad of tasks including sticking aluminum foil in the through hulls to keep crawlies and wasps from getting inside.
Then there are all the things one must do to take a boat out of mothballs. Tom's going out a week ahead to survey the scene and give me a heads up for anything I might have to bring at the last moment. He's taking a new watermaker to install before we set off as the old one, refurbished, had its' last legs on my trip out. And despite those die hard sailors who ration water, I don't want to go weeks without a shower.
The bottom will need painting. The fuel tank will need emptying. The water tanks will need rinsing with fresh water and cleaner. The rigging will need checking along with the sails. I'd taken the hamm radio with me and that will have to be carried back and reinstalled. The batteries despite solar charger will likely have gone dry and need replacing.
There's the fear of theft though the marina storage facility hasn't had much of that problem. Still I'm looking forward to hearing that my spare parts and tools are all safe. There's often little real value in theft compared to the massive inconvenience it can cause. Propane tanks will need to be filled and the galley stove checked. I've ordered a new washer for the salt water pump and we're anticipating we'll have to change the head pump as well.
I checked passports and papers and found that the ships registry address was wrong. Thankfully the Vancouver Registry office issued me new papers in record time.
It was great to already get a reply from Donna Sassaman to my query about routing on the Bluewater Cruising Association message board:
Bill and I left Hawaii for BC on May 26, 1993 and we never did get over thetop of the high, which spread hugely to the north and west that year. So, wedid what any self-respecting cruisers do when they're in 'homing pigeon'mode: we sailed and sometime motored through it. There was a gale about a1,000 miles out from Juan de Fuca that helped us improve our speed a bit butother than that 36-hour push, it was a bit slow.A couple of details that I remember: (1) there was a nasty trail of plasticgarbage strewn for miles and miles along the shipping lanes north of Hawaii(we had seen no garbage in the southern hemisphere), and (2)for a couple ofdays we sailed through gazillions of jellyfish that looked like little blueboats with white sails. Unbelievable! We were in radio contact with othercruisers hundreds of miles away who were experiencing similar gazillions!Safe passage-making, and please remember to write an account for Currents onyour way back!
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