Time to go!

photo we used for out boat card,
thanks Petra for taking the pic!

After what seems like a year of preparation, we are finally about ready to go out the Gate and turn left! 

We officially needed to leave today (end of the month) from our slip, but we are still here until the morning. Our plan had been to pull out very early in the morning, but Jolanda wasn't feeling too well today. So instead it seems we will just head out in the morning somewhere else in the Bay to hang out for a quite day ... maybe the Corinthian Yacht club in Tiburon. Then we will probably leave early on Thursday to start our trek southward.

End of projects? Projects never end!

I imagine that many non-boaters don't quite understand why it seems like we have been working on boat projects for so long.  Like ... what could we possibly need to do to prepare the boat?  Just a few years ago we did a two month trip to southern California, so what more should be necessary?

The way that boat maintenance projects seem
 to come (one of my favorite comics,
from Omni magazine, June 1979)

Well, I thought it would be illustrative to list the projects that we have accomplished in the past few months to prep for the trip.  This is all from my memory, so I'm surely missing some.  Most of these were done by me, except for a few that we outsourced to professionals.  Some of these projects were major upgrades and were quite involved, taking a week or so to do; others were simple & quick ...well, actually, almost no project is ever simple, as there seems to always be some complication in even the seemingly simplest project!

Folks say that all cruisers have a list of projects to do before departure, which cannot possibly all be accomplished before departure. The only choice is to either leave with some projects not done, or never leave!  Of course we were no exception -- the biggest undone project was the installation of solar panels.  We have them on board, and I will likely install them within the next few weeks, somewhere along the CA coast.

And, naturally maintenance projects never end -- just today I had to do a quick adjustment of our transmission lever linkage.  We were taking the boat over to the pump-out station.  When we were backing the boat out of our slip, it refused to go into forward gear!  Our momentum almost took us into the boats behind us, but luckily the forward gear clicked in just in time.

Cruising Prep Projects (in no particular order):

One fun project - Masthead plate

I realize that reading about a boat project may not be that exciting, but boat projects have been pretty much my world for the past couple months, so that is what you get to hear about!  This project was one of the many unplanned projects.  It is amazing to me that stuff that had been working for years (in this case, about 30 years!) suddenly decides to break now, just as we are trying to whittle down our long list of planned projects.  Maybe I should chalk it up to the fact that we are inspecting all aspects of the boat more carefully now than ever before ... and obviously it's better to be able to fix it now than try to do it in Mexico.  So I should be happy about it, right?!

Breaking welded extension on mast top
plate for halyard mounting

So, anyway, I was up at the top of the mast about two weeks ago, cleaning up some loose wires, and I noticed a rather disturbing thing -- a welded aluminum plate was about to break off!  This piece is an extension off the front of the mast top plate, which holds a U-bolt, onto which is mounted our spinnaker halyard.

Excited is the new word

Tessa is constantly learning new words and phrases, and the latest one is "I'm excited". Excited to see friends, excited to go to Happy Hour (which basically means going out for dinner at 5 PM at reduced happy hour prices).

We are excited too....our final days here in Berkeley. Excited to start this new phase in our life, excited to show Tessa new places. She has been talking about going to Mexico for quite a while. When friends ask this almost 2.5 yrs old " where are you going to" she will say " to Mexico", and " when are you going" she has been saying  "on Saturday" for a while.

But we are also sad to say goodbye to all dear friends we have made in the Bay Area. We hope to see all of them again, but when that will be...time will tell.

And lastly, I would also describe feelings aboard as exhausted. Tod is generally up until way past midnite and even I don't go to sleep until close to midnite. No need for an alarm for us, because at 7AM Tessa is happily and loudly singing in the V-berth! Tja, doing this kind of journey with a toddler adds a totally different dimension to life.

our happy camper singing in her room

Tod trying out our emergency rudder for our self steering windvane,
the rudder we hope never have to use