Renee and I
hit the wall last weekend, overwhelmed by preparing the boat and house and the
ever-decreasing number of days before our planned departure date. After a
mutual freak-out and intense “sharing of feelings”, I decided I needed a coping
strategy. Renee already has one; she just keeps stoically plugging away, gets
up earlier, and goes to bed later. Hers may not always be the most efficient strategy, but it works for her and she
maintains continuous progress. Me, I
need to stop, analyze and develop a plan of attack. My progress tops until I figure something out. Our strategies tend to reinforce each other,
but also can be a source of conflict and frustration.
So my
coping strategy was to take paper and pencil and layout two pages in my
notebook. The first page is a list of all significant tasks that remained to be
done arranged in timeline columns with headings “Must Do to Leave”, “Enroute”, and
“Later”. The second page is a three-week
calendar. I took all the tasks under the
“Must Do to Leave” column and fit them into the calendar. The result: We won’t be leaving on October 1st.
It’s just not possible. But we can get close.
If all goes
per my revised plan, we should be able to depart on October 3rd or 4th.
That’s actually a bit better than our original October 1st target
because it allows us to leave on a weekend so that people who want to can wave
goodbye from the dock. More importantly, they can buy me drinks the evening
before!
We’re almost
a week into the plan and actual progress is tracking pretty closely, but not
perfectly. We hope not to, but we the schedule might end up slipping a few
days. That’s okay, but each day of delay
will give us less time to enjoy sailing down the California coast and fewer
days to just kick back and relax along the way.
The fixed
deadline we need to make is the start of the Baja Ha-Ha rally in San Diego on
October 26. Working the schedule backwards, we need to arrive in San Diego by
October 21 to re-provision, care for the boat after sailing down the coast,
hook up with our Baja crew, and enjoy the pre-rally events. It only takes 3-4
days to sail non-stop for San Francisco to San Diego, but we’re not doing
that! With only the two of us sailing
and so that we can pick good weather windows for sailing and for our mental
health, we need a minimum of two weeks. So that means we have to leave no later than
October 7.
So we now
have a departure window- sometime between October 3 and October 7.
Meanwhile,
Renee is finishing house projects, I’m buttoning up boat projects and doing the
final outfitting of equipment and supplies and we are both starting to box up
the stuff in the house so we can start moving it into storage.
Today I’m
going to install and activate our IridiumGo satellite device. This will provide
basic communication (text, simple email) and provide weather forecasts and
routing while we’re sailing. When I get it working, I’ll send my first blog
post “via satellite”.
