Food has been provisioned, bags have been packed, the boat has been prepared (mostly). We head to the boat the night before to get settled in and prepare to leave early the next morning.

No solar for you

It starts out with some bad news. There is a problem with the solar arch, it won’t be completed before we go. Which means we are going to struggle to keep our fridge going for our trip! We didn’t take the news well, our enthusiasm crashed. And then we slowly rebuilt. We came up with a plan to purchase two spare batteries that we could swap out when needed. This would double our amp hours and our existing batteries were nearing end of life anyways.

More water

Another issue we deal with on Foggy is drinking water. We have tons of water in two 115 L (30 gallon) tanks but nobody likes to drink it. We pack between 6-10 plastic jugs of drinking water. But this wouldn’t be enough and would have to stop several times to replenish. We decided to try a Brita water filter and picked it up at the same time we bought our spare batteries.

Wow, we should have done this a long time ago! We did a taste comparison and couldn’t tell the difference between the bottled water and the filtered water from our water tanks. That was the only time we drank bottled water our entire trip.

Spare parts

“Should we bring this extra box of spare parts on our trip?”

“Nah, we’ll be good.”

We didn’t make it one hour before we needed those spare parts. We noticed a slow drip coming from the pipe connected to the head and it wasn’t fresh water. The pipe clamp was an older one and seemed to be stripped and unable to tighten any more.

It was a really subtle leak, but I didn’t want to deal with it at all during our trip. At 10pm I decided to drive back home to grab the box of spare parts. 12pm back on the boat. 1am the leak has been fixed, time for bed!

Preparing to leave

Our first stop is going to be Waupoos, taking our preferred outside route. Weather forecast was positive and on the docks there were a lot of new transient boats and kept hearing others mention Waupoos as well. Looks like it’s going to be a busy sail tomorrow!

We want to give ourselves lots of time and try and beat the rush so we set our alarm for 5am and go to bed. OK, we thought we set the alarm for 5am. Apparently setting your alarm for 5pm doesn’t work that great when you want to get up early.

Next story from this trip: We are heading out today!

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