Phase XI Countdown

March 15, 2014

A strange thing happens when we stop in a place, in this case home, for any period. We start to "nest" and that means unpacking then spreading the stuff all around our location. It happens on the boat and it really happens when we come home. We are now just six days and a wake up from starting back to Why Knot. That means we must now find, collect and pack the stuff we brought home. We call that pile the "go box", but it is much more than just a box. This time, we have another sail and the Portland Pudgy dink we shipped here so we could play this winter. That happened only once thus it was really a futile idea. There have been more than a few of them along the way.
We have been watching a fellow sailor and good friend prepare his boat for relocation from Corpus Christi to St. Petersburg, This will be his first long voyage in Take Off Time. It has been fun to watch the preparation during the past few weeks. Certainly, we wish him and his crew well in the effort and look forward to hearing about the voyage.
We are now to down to farewell visits with friends and family this week in addition to the packing. As we have aged, farewells come harder but they are offset a bit by the anticipation of seeing Why Knot and how she survived the winter.
So, here we are at almost the date of departure and we still have some home projects to finish. The new main sail is on order and we look forward to seeing it underway. This is fair warning to S/V Rigel, who trounced us last year so many times, that they might just prepare to stare at us from behind this year. We have some tricks up our mental sleeve to further unburden WK so as to sprint more easily, not that we have been plotting these last six months.
Excited is not the word for our mental state now. We shall hoist the "Blue Peter" in ten days. For the lubbers reading this, the Blue Peter is not what you may be thinking.