Terrified vs Excited??

March 31, 2015

Adrenalin rushing, the stomach churning, brain switching from one subject to another, no chance of sleeping....... So am I terrified or excited?    According to my younger son, Josh, the only difference between terror and excitement is attitude.    So at the moment I am working on my attitude. Tomorrow morning we head south for 3 weeks. Admittedly we will have access to land, humanity, restaurants and marine stores (ie Help!); however, the whole idea is to get the feel of cruising in out-of -the-way places and being as self sufficient as possible.  Even though we will be traveling with a couple of buddy boats, I still think it sounds scary...no, no I mean fun and challenging.  Right?  

First round of provisioning

The provisioning part of it has been fun and challenging.  Really! It has been an interesting exercise trying to calculate everything we will need for 3 weeks, sorting out how to store it so we can find it (not as easy as it sounds) and deciding just how we can prepare it.(also not as easy as it sounds).  We hope to be anchored or on a mooring ball most of the time, not at a marina with all of the "conveniences" of home.  Therefore, because our boat is almost totally dependent on electricity for cooking, we have to determine our power source:  the inverter, the generator, or power from the engine.  If those fail, we have a small propane grill that we can attach to a lifeline stanchion.  If that, too, fails, we'll just eat cold hot dogs and beans!

In any case, we are almost fully provisioned.  We carry 215 gallons of water in our tanks and 95 gallons of diesel.  But, just in case something quite unforeseen happens we are carrying a small emergency supply of both water and diesel on deck.  

So just when we think we are pretty well prepared, "Murphy" strikes.  I woke up in the middle of the night last night listening to a hum; a hum that I had heard the night before but one that Jim and I both sort of ignored.  (First mistake of sailing!)  But in the middle of the night it was much louder and much more ominous and sounded slightly different and seemed to involve some sort of slurping.  I lifted up the bilge cover and there was the source of the noise!  Not much water in the bilge, but it appeared that the pump was trying to pump it out anyhow.  Time to wake Jim!!  After fiddling around for awhile, he disconnected a wire, the noise stopped and he decided it was quite safe to go back to bed and deal with it in the morning!  What??  He, of course, slept.  I didn't.

See the blue (non working) box that says "sure bail"?

Jim replacing the blue with the white (new) !

Turned out that the problem was the float switch - a little piece of equipment that tells the bilge pump to start pumping.  And, it is also supposed to tell it to stop pumping.  Only this switch didn't do that and the pump just kept on pumping.   Jim figured it out, bought a new part, and installed it.  All is well ..... until the next thing!

Ok, so I am not terrified, just a little nervous.  But I'm sure my "attitude" will improve as we have some successes under our belts and we are no longer doing everything for the "first" time.