Let me tell you how I have been dealing with the situation. Since the boat has been two-thousand miles away, all I have been able to do is prepare. I have prepared until I have nothing left to prepare.
I have made lists. I have made a list of all the tasks that need to be done while the boat is out of the water in the work area. I have made a list of all the tasks that need to be done when the boat gets back in the water but before it reaches the marina. I have made a list of tasks to be done when the boat reaches the Emeryville marina. I have made a list of EVERY SINGLE THING we want to do to the boat for the next YEAR. I have made a list of the tools that we need to obtain, organized by task. I have made a list of the tools and materials to gather together before starting each task. I have made a list of each step to do to complete each task.
Continue reading “I Cannot Be More Prepared”
First it was the cushions. Now it’s getting the boat across the border.
We’d planned, months ago, to have Syzygy trucked up to San Francisco in mid March, during Jon’s spring break. Before Jon bought plane tickets to Mexico, I talked to Jazmin, at Marina San Carlos. She told me that the wacky spring tides were too low, preventing us from getting Syzygy out of the water until April 9th. (We later heard stories of other boats scraping against the bottom and getting stuck, right at the launch ramp.) So we rescheduled our trucking for April 14th, and pushed back Jon’s visit to April 25th. Since trucking Syzygy from San Carlos to San Francisco takes a week, we expected Syzygy to be here, well, now.
Then Jazmin quit (or got fired), and things got shuffled around.
Matt and I spent a day last week cutting the new rigging for Syzygy, after we spent a day going over the numbers that we collected in Mexico. Why a whole day looking at 10 numbers? Because there were, uh, discrepancies between Jon’s measurements and Matt’s measurements. Sometimes those discrepancies were only 1/8 inch; sometimes those discrepancies were 1 1/4 inch. Fortunately, that’s why we have turnbuckles — so that we can tune the rig to the proper tautness, even if the shrouds are a bit long or short.
Matt and I spent last week in San Carlos, Mexico, readying Syzygy for shipment. It was a week full of victories and discoveries and very satisfying moments, in which our labors appeared to have paid off.
We flew to Phoenix on Friday night, and then hussled over to the Tufesa bus station, to catch an overnight bus down to San Carlos. At midnight I gave Matt a pack of Mentos, and wished him a happy 30th birthday – what better place to celebrate than on an uncomfortable plastic chair beneath fluorescent lights in a shady part of Phoenix? We rolled into Nogales at 6am, and I laughed as yet again, after all these trips to Mexico, we got green lights at the border. All these trips, and never searched; while in the States, airport security takes my toothpaste because the tube exceeds 3 ounces.
