Oh Six Hundred

It’s still dark outside, and the air in the vee berth has a decidedly chilly nip as I start to emerge from under our massive comforter. Donna is already up, calling from the galley, “Hey, can I repack the fridge?” And again, moments later, “Where’s the sausage? My god! The freezer is full!”

We made a last minute dash to Costco last night, arriving just a half hour before their closing time to stock up, mainly on meat. Ribeye, pork chops, flap steak, an entire coop full of chickens, sausage, turkey bacon, butter, six pints of egg whites, coffee — only the essentials.

Most of it has been stowed in the freezer. The reefer is already full from Donna’s earlier trip to Trader Joe’s, along with plenty of fish for the freezer, which has been running all night in a valiant attempt to solidify the new arrivals, pulling our house battery bank down to 85% capacity.

Donna has the Bialetti on the stove, making real coffee as a treat rather than the instant decaf we usually drink in the mornings. It’s already starting to sputter, blowing a plume of steam across the cabin.

I get up, and pull nearly every single thing from the freezer, some frozen hard, some still yet to freeze, but all of it cold. After a quick discussion about what we’ll want and how to layer things so we won’t have to dig every time we need something, we get the freezer packed and closed again and the compressors continue chugging along.

Today we leave!

This morning we still have a lot to do though. The new life raft, purchased because the old one was no longer serviceable, needs to be mounted on deck. Moving it out of the cockpit locker it was stowed in to a deck mounted container will both make it easier to deploy in case of need, and free up a huge amount of space in our cockpit locker.

Then we need to prepare the boat for sea: everything needs to be stowed, the jack lines need to be rigged (these provide attachments for our tethers in case we need to go out on the foredeck, so we can’t get pitched off the boat by a passing wave), sail covers removed, sails rigged, navigation waypoints programmed into the chart plotter.

But first coffee, and breakfast, and a few quiet moments before diving into the day…