Oh, Yeah…

The frenzy of preparations are starting to ramp down for the Burnetts, which is good, as Mel was beginning to question her own sanity for wanting to do this again. Her recent life was not consistent with her memories of cruising, which mostly were of the rush of water past our hulls during relaxing downwind sails accompanied by dolphins, gorgeous sunsets, “Water Days” with her family, quaint seaside towns, time for hobbies and creative pursuits, only minor boat breakages, and perfect provisioning. Turns out that moving onto a boat to cruise is similar to giving birth. Your brain represses the trauma part so that you one day you will want to do it again.

Fortunately, over the last few weeks Greg and Mel have experienced the bubbling up of repressed memories of how to do this.  Every 20 minutes or so, Yeoman Penelope witnesses this sort of exchange:

Mel: “I don’t remember having to keep swapping out the plugs for our kitchen appliances.  How did we do this last time?”

Greg: ”I added outlets everywhere.”

Mel: “Oh, yeah…”

Greg goes out and buys more wire.

Greg: “Don’t forget to open the jib furling line clutch before we unfurl the jib”

Mel: “Oh, yeah…”

Mel reminds herself to use her old checklist. Or the boat will do it for her.

It turns out that so many things are unfolding now just as they did almost exactly 10 years ago. Mel finds herself stowing things exactly where she recalls they were stowed last time. The “Tape & Glue” bucket is filled with all sorts of 3M products and is utilized 10 times a day.  Mel buys way too many big storage boxes and has to swap them out for smaller storage boxes. Greg immediately starts fiddling with the electrical, and after some confusing switcheroos of labels suddenly we can run the A/C off of batteries.

While many things about this lifestyle are the same, Mel is discovering some new innovations that tickle her Gen-X love of new gadgets and version updates.

Here are some things that are new to us:

1. Starlink. Which is quirkier than we anticipated, BTW.
2. AnyList. Mel’s quartermastering was so much easier with this app. 138 items to buy, all but 29 checked off!
3. NoForeignLand, Dockwa, AquaMap, and other cool apps we have yet to explore.
4. ActiveCaptain was acquired by Garmin. No opinions about this yet.
5. PreparedPhysician.com. Mel can use her MD to actually buy suture kits online instead of, er, acquiring such things from work. More on this later!
6. Amazon pickup/lockers. So nice for us “transients” to have stuff delivered to a temporary address instead of making our guests cart weird things like museum glue in their luggage!

Here are some things that are not much changed:

1. Our Raymarine Axiom chartplotter’s user interface and overall functioning. The menu system is still a bit of an inefficient mess, but at least it’s a familiar mess.
2. The dominance and yet fragility of Dometic coolers. According to the internet, they still break after 2-3 years apparently. Did we get one? Of course we did.

Here are some things that are worse:

1. West Marine’s brick and mortar stores. Hardly anything in stock, employees know nothing (they cut off some polyline for us with SCISSORS); it’s basically a Yeti and fishing supply store now.
2. Mel’s balance and agility. She will NOT fall out of the dinghy this time!
3. Florida. Like, all of Florida.

At last the Burnetts have had some time to take advantage of one of the perks of this lifestyle by exploring! After a day of tech support, Mel got a new plugin to display her travel map, which shows their recent journeys to Ocracoke and Norfolk, VA. Peruse the pics below while Mel defrosts the freezer.  Turns out if you don’t close it all the way, it frosts over and doesn’t work as well. 

Oh, yeah.