Almost ready. . .

Wow, it has been a busy week and a half. We are so close to leaving. In fact we leave the area tomorrow. We will head out Long Island Sound and stop briefly in Newport, Rhode Island to check out of the country and make sure our fuel tanks are filled up. We are feeling more and more ready for this next leg of the adventure.

In the last week we have been trying to put Seasura in ‘ship shape’. In otherwords, we are provisioning and organizing/cleaning up etc. so that she can withstand the longer passage. We have stocked up on spare parts for all the major systems and stocked up on tonnes and tonnes of food (including 75L of milk, yes, 4 children go through a lot of milk). More on our provisioning later.

Our most exciting accomplishment was the installation of our new batteries! They have made such a huge improvement on our power system (and it is a good thing because they were a lot of work to build and install since we had to expand the battery tray they were in and added in switches). I truly didn’t realize how much better they would be. We now have four batteries that have more than 4 times as powerful and could be even up to 8 times more powerful. They last almost 2 days without charging them and all our systems run with them going instead of having to run the generator. So, now we only run our generator for an hour or so in the evening to recharge the batteries, and not every day. Also, because we now have these powerful batteries, we were able to install our new stove top and oven, both of which are electric. We are so excited. We are excited to get rid of the propane that we were using for the oven and stove before. In part because propane can be difficult to find at times in other parts of the world, but also because it takes up space. As well, the oven was old and the last time I tried to use it I had a fireball blow the oven door open. I wasn’t going to use that oven again!

The other big changes we made were building storage into our bilges to help put everything away. Our bilges are about a meter deep and there are 4 that have few things in them so they make for good places to store things. Unfortunately, they can occasionally get water in them, so we put in removalable shelves at the bottom on which to put the bins and keep them above any small amount of water that might accumulate. Putting stuff in the bilges has opened up loads of space in our deckhouse. We also gained storage space where our propane tank was and where half of the old batteries were. So, we purchased some more storage bins to put even more spare parts away.

Progress in the week was made a little slower because we were hit with flu bug that was particularly hard on Halyna. However, she is now recovering and will be back to working on her tasks related to preparing the boat.

In the last two days we have done a lot of driving around to get food provisions and exchange our new radar. We have been sailing without a radar so far, but want to benefit from it’s ability to identify storm clouds as we cross the ocean. We purchased the new radar back in April and have had it on the boat since we picked it up in early June. However, when we finally went to put it up, Kevin discovered that the version he got wasn’t compatible with our multifunctional display or chart plotter. Our chart plotter is too old for the newer version of the radar so we actually needed a older version. We were very thankful to work with a good company, Defender, that was willing to still take back the new one for store credit, even though it had been so long, so we could get the version that is compatible with our multifunctional diplay. Unfortunately, it meant that we had to take part of our provision days and drive all the way to Defender, in Waterford Conneticut, a 2 to 3 hour drive away (depending on traffic). We are now in possession of the correct radar and yesterday Kevin took the old one down in preparation to put the new one up tomorrow. Our last upgrade/task before we go.

We are getting tired of driving to pick things up and working hard to get things we need by having them sent to mailrooms or driving all over the place. However, we have very little left to do to our boat so we hope that in Europe we can just enjoy the traveling more (ha ha, I know that this will not be likely because there are always things to do on a boat). It has made me reflect this week on simpler times. I am now old enough to reflect back fondly on times when we didn’t have google maps on our phones and shopping online. Back then, if you couldn’t get something in the local store, you learned to make do without it. I imagine that was particularly true with people living on their sailboats and cruising the world like we are. Instead, we now know we can get it in a few days (or one day) later from Amazon or another store and so we organized to have it sent to mailrooms or amazon lockers and then have to figure ways to get them. It occupies more of Kevin’s time than it should. But for the engineer in him, the knowledge that he can have everything he needs, is too great. I also told Kevin that I think we haven’t really given ourselves over to living on a sailboat. If we had, we won’t still be planning to get so much done in a day!

So, provisioning a boat for a trip like this is obviously new to us. After doing a little reading about it I planned out a menu. We are expecting to take about 12 to 16 days to get to the Azores. However, we want to plan food for a month so we have extra. And, on top of that we need to have enough canned food to last a few weeks in case our fridge dies in the middle of the ocean. We also have to keep in mind that fresh food will only stay fresh for so long. I, therefore, planned meals that will not use fresh food, but rather frozen or canned versions of veggies for later in the trip. We will see how I end up doing. I am hoping we don’t end up wasting much food. Much of the canned can of course be eaten later on any other passages we do. I also tried to plan to have some meals that are very easy to prepare incase the weather makes for difficult cooking conditions. Our provisioning took us to Costco, Walmart, the local grocery store and Whole Foods. We ended up with 4 dinghy loads of food and filled the spaces below all our beds with extra food. The food was put in bins mostly and taken out of boxes for better storage. Woodbugs can live in cardboard so we want to minimize how much we have on board. I have to make a map of where everything is stored on the boat now so that everyone, besides me, can find things when they need to. We went to Whole Foods for just one item, liquid eggs. We wanted to try this and see if it was a better way to store a larger amount of eggs. If it doesn’t work, then we might have to consider powered egg in the future. As I write this, I still need to fit about 2 bins of food somewhere on the boat. . .

Oh, I almost forgot! We took one day off to go visit the Bronx Zoo. It was a lovely zoo with lots of trees and large paths to walk on. We went on a Monday too, so there wasn’t a lot of people competing for animal viewings. Some of the animals even sat right up against the glass so we got a close look. As we exited the zoo, we walked by the seal area and it was near a bunch of old building that we presumed were the original zoo. The Bronx zoo has been around for over 120 years! The obvious history of the buildings was very cool. I can’t wait to see more historic buildings in Europe!