Planning to get ready - bulletin #1

During our house sitting of Terry's house on Saltspring during January, one of my tasks was to go through the never-ending TODO list of boat chores and prioritize those that need to be done for the QCI trip.

I did that and tried to put some realistic estimates for the effort for each task (using the boat factor: a task that would be 1-2 hours at home will be at least 1/2 day on a boat). The result was a list of 22 days worth of work of #1 priority tasks.... a bit of a surprise.

These range from repairing the leaking sink drain to installing the repaired wind direction/speed transducer onto the mast-head. Major work like installing and re-wiring a new electrical panel will be done post-Trip; also post-poned is the plan to re-configure the salon into a dinette arrangement. We both had visions of getting 1/2 way into either of these projects and finding a major glitch that would impact being ready for the Trip. These will be good fall projects; i.e. we can walk away without impacting our sailing season!

I only managed to re-build one hatch cover over the winter and have put the other 2 covers down to level 2 priority; i.e. will try to get it done before winter but likely after the QCI trip ( i''ll refer to this as the Trip in future ).

At the moment I have small jib at the sailmakers for repairs and the original large genoa in to be recut to smaller. (it was a 130% and will end up at about 110%). We have found that Tatoosh sails much better with smaller jib rather than large genoa ( at least more comfortable to handle) without sacrificing much speed. These and storm sails will be tested in various combo's before the Trip.

I've also received our series drogue from Australia and we need to test rigging and retrieving this wee beastie. The US coast guard recommended this type of drogue after much study which you can read at the drogue vendor's site: www.seriesdrogue.com

Robin and I expect to be out on the coast about April 6 or so; as well as working, we will be doing a bunch of training exercises to get Robin up to speed. She is planning on taking the next level of ISPA training and prudently wants to hone her skills before getting onto a strange instructor's boat. She has been studiously going through our old ISPA notes.

Stay tuned! I will try to upload a screen shot of the planned route for the Trip as well as a task list for priority 1 tasks to give you a flavour of what is in store for April.