Today we made our final preparations. We now have everything that we need to make the crossing except for the weather, and it now looks like we should be able to leave the mooring at midnight or shortly after and get across by before lunch on Tuesday. I'm starting to get excited!

For today it looks like we are going to be lazy for the rest of it. Other than changing the water filter and seeing what I can do to hook up the water maker at long last. Neith of which happened by the way.

We motored over to the adjacent marina to check out the diesel prices and decided, screw it, we have 70 gallons in the tank and another 15 on deck and the prices here are in the vicinity of $4/gal so we may as well make it easier on ourselves and get across and buy a fill up over there. The one more little job will be to fill our drinking water containers during one of the trips we make into the dingy dock. By the way, the dingy dock is the only fly in the ointment about this place. For the number of boats out at anchor or in the mooring field the dingy dock is rather small and since there are a lot of people who leave their boats here while they travel elsewhere or who work in town there is almost never any room at the dock. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that a number of these folk lock their dinks up with a very short painter. The marina tells us that they are looking at putting an additional dock space in so obviously they are aware of the problem. Today it came to a bit of a head as far as we are concerned with Barb taking a swim trying to get ashore over the tops of some of these short lined dinks. No harm done except that it shouldn't have happened.

We did, however, take the opportunity to fill the water tanks up using our three 5 gallon jerry cans. Since we last had a fill up when we arrived we were down about 20 gallons or three and a third jerry cans. That's about five gallons a day. Not too bad.

The other thing that has been bugging me is this whole Gulf Stream business. I know the adage-don't cross with any North in the weather but seriously, we have crossed the Gulf of Main one way or the other at least a dozen times and there is a significant Fundy Current there too. Yes there can be some sea kicked up when the current and wind are in opposition but nothing that most cruising yachts can't handle. I remember delivering Nelleke to the start of a Marblehead race pounding into a head sea of 4-5' for nearly 48 hours. Not fun, but we got there. Is the Gulf Stream off Miami really that much worse? Tomorrow we will be setting off and the wind is supposed to be out of the west but might be from the northwest and it is supposed to be 5-10 knots but it could be 10-15 so maybe I'll find out.