Day 79, Year 10: Preparing for Take-off
Date: Sunday, December 28, 2014
Weather: Beautiful, Warm, Mostly Sunny Day, Temp in 70’s F
Location: R Dock, Lightkeepers Marina, Little River, SC
Today was all about getting ready for our sail south to Florida. Mark spent the day doing things on Windbird and I spent my day at my sister Patsy’s doing laundry cooking food for the passage. Mark’s big job was reinforcing the stitching in our bimini. He and Lee also spent some time taking boxes of our photos from Patsy and Joe’s to Lee and Lynda’s house. It is very possible that Patsy and Joe will be making the move to Nashville before we return in the spring, so we needed to relocate our things so we can then take them back to Cape Cod with us in the spring. We had dinner with Patsy and Joe and came home to check our ‘To Do’ lists and strategize about tomorrow. Mark has a treatment in Myrtle Beach at 1:45 pm, so we’ll work on the boat until then, and do our final food shopping after the treatment. I want to be with Mark when he meets with the nurse practitioner. We have lots of questions about the new development of Mark’s low saturated iron level. My immediate remedy would be to have him eat grass-fed, grass-finished organic beef liver once a week, but I have no source of this here. I can order it from Wellness Meats and have it delivered to my sister-in-law’s in Florida, but we won’t be there for another week and a half. He is doing fine, but I will be anxious to arrive in Florida so we can get the liver and fresh dark greens for him to eat every day. In the meantime, I’ll cook a lot of kale in mineral broth for us to take with us and he’ll take the iron supplement the doctor prescribed.
Preparing for a passage is an exciting time, but it can also be a tense time. Trying to find places to stow away all the food and other supplies you will need is always a challenge. We are very experienced in doing this, and still it is a challenge. I can only think back to October 2005 to try and imagine what Lee and Lynda must be going through. Mark saw them today and tells me their preparations are going fairly smoothly. I don’t know about them, but I know both Mark and I are very anxious now to get this show on the road. Cold weather is headed this way, so we’d like to get as far south as possible as soon as we can. Cold weather is coming because the wind shifts to come from the north tomorrow and stays that way until about Friday. The temp will start dropping and tomorrow evening we will have rain. By the time we are ready to leave on Tuesday morning, the daytime high temp here will be in the 50’s and the nighttime temp in the 30’s. So we’ll have a cool take-off and first night, but as we get closer to the Florida border, the temps will start to rise again. Like everything in life, it is a trade-off. We get favorable northerly winds to blow us southward, but with those winds, we get cooler weather. Thankfully both Windbird and Sea Turtle have full cockpit enclosures and we are both carrying a Mr. Heater propane stove that we can use to take off the chill. The cockpit enclosure is a brand new addition for Sea Turtle, and one that I know both Lynda and Lee will appreciate during their first offshore passage.
