Boat prep...

Back in Oriental, and Alizee is looking good...

The past two weeks seem to have flown by, day after day filled with the tasks of provisioning and supplying Alizee with all stuff necessary to embark on a two-month cruise and with checking out systems to make sure they’re working correctly.  If I’d owned her for longer or spent more time aboard than just a few weeks over the past half-year, I suppose it would go a lot more easily, but such is life.  Instead, it’s been a bit frenetic and my insecurities abound with each new little task.

I started it out by starting to purchase provisions … food and household supplies … which was not too hard, particularly since Penelope was here to offer suggestions and join me in treks to the market.  Alas, she had to return to Florida, the real work of figuring out the needed boat stuff emerged, and I’ve spent at least a week haunting West Marine, the local marine consignment store, and Oriental’s “Inland Waterway Treasure and Provisioning Company,” not to mention buying on-line.  The purchases have been miniscule (shackles for the dinghy anchor line and gasket seal) to substantial (a Winslow four-man life raft and AIS and marine weather systems), and not surprisingly I’ve made a couple of duplicate buys, which then have required my tracking back to red-facedly making returns. 

On the whole, the buying and installation process of things has gone pretty well.  Pete Waterson, owner/operator of Seacoast Marine Electronics, provided and installed my AIS (automatic ship identification) and Sirius Marine Weather systems, which are integrated with my Raymarine C-80 chartplotter and radar, and along the way Pete helped me trouble-shoot my Link 20 battery monitors and reinstall my mast-top wind speed device.  New boxes at the bottom of the aft hanging locker (actually the only usable one, since the air conditioning unit is in the larger forward hanging locker), and wires, wires everywhere...

I’m still trying to work out some engine maintenance and trouble-shooting with Deaton’s Yacht Service, but it should get done in the next week.

The past three days I’ve finally finished putting together on Excel a full inventory of all the boat supplies (spare parts, tools, and such) as well as a full inventory of provisions (food, household supplies, and such), which indicates where every item is stored and how many units of each item there are.  I’ll use this to fill in final gaps in things … especially food provisions … and then the inventories become the working resupply documents for boat management.