"It is better for a man to lose himself in his passion, than to lose his passion"
Jacques Mayol

Donna and I have had our passion waver ever so slightly lately. As mentioned in the previous blog, we were scheduled to leave January 20th for Cape Town. Our new date to depart is the third week of February with a late March launch.
It would have been nice to spend several months of leisure in the islands coming back; but that is not in the new plan. We have to be in Ft Lauderdale by the middle of May so they can check all systems and the rigging, perform any warranty work, and get us north of North Carolina before the start of hurricane season (June 1st ) to comply with our insurance. We also would have preferred being away during the cold part of the calendar. We are particularly susceptible to the cold as we have been working hard to lower our body fat; luckily we learned of the latest schedule change just in time to gain our normal holiday weight, which should get us through till February.
We are planning on shipping some things to South Africa, but they constitute less than a cubic meter of materials. We are mostly sending things that came off of the former "Eclectic", which I do not want to repurchase i.e. specialized tools, power tools, galley equipment, EPIRB, clothing, foul weather gear etc. The total cost to ship is approximately $600.00 but to spend redundantly would be 4 to 5 times as much; so the cost to benefit ratio says ship that margarita blender. Besides, we would have to go without quite a few things as we cannot get electrical equipment of a USA voltage there (and we need our margarita blender).
We will update you again prior to embarkation.