STORM BEFORE THE CALM

Moving onto a boat is messy.

Good Company has tons, really tons of storage, and it's all hidden, which in the awesome category means all your crap is hidden from view. In the not-so-awesome category, it means all your crap is hidden from view. It takes some real organizational skill to find a logical place for everything and then, just as importantly, remember where that logical place is. We have to either work together, keep a list or give each other tours of our stowing. Otherwise it's a big, not fun game of I Don't Spy.

This week has an extra large learning curve. Fortunately neither of us knows much about the systems on this boat. Fortunately? Yes, we're on equal footing here. We learn it together and then we both know how to use it, start it, stop it, furl it, fix it, raise it, lower it, dewinterize it, everything. There are no reluctant, "dragged aboard" members here. (And since you brought it up, can we stop with the sailing mag articles about reluctant female sailors?!?!)

So far:
--Dewinterized, cleaned and filled the water tank. Great water pressure!
--Turned on the refrigerator/freezer.
--Puzzled over the bilge pump until we realized, it doesn't work. Got it fixed.
--Got a quick lesson in our packing gland from the helpful guy who repacked it.
--Learned how to furl sails on Harken furlers. Only had to redo one of them.
--Rerigged some of the furling and jib lines. We'll see how that works out.
--Put on the dodger and bimini. For a while we were wearing a big Sunsail shroud, but we got it eventually. I do hope someone was watching.
--Learned how to use the dinghy davits and hoisted the dinghy -- after pushing it across the street on a dock cart, pulling it through the water and over a floating dock.
--Played with the GPS enough to navigate around the GPS. Now on to the bigger picture.

Our original hope was to cross the Chesapeake to Annapolis today as a shakedown, but the boatyard forgot to fix the masthead light when they went up this morning. IF they get to it later today or first thing in the morning, we might be able to cross.