Countdown

Two weeks and counting! The launch date is fast approaching and there are lots of little details that seem to pop up. I'm sure Don is busier than all of us with all the planning for shipping the boat and getting us underway. The plan is to pack the boat this Saturday with as much food and essentials as we can prior to transporting the boat to Norfolk. Don, Ken and I will probably be involved in the packing process so that maybe one of us can remember where things are stowed. I will be bringing a laptop so Tom can install a program to calculate our positioning based on our sextant readings. We are hoping that this will strictly be used for fun and not because of a failure of all the GPS units we will have on board. Tom just mentioned in his last email that he will be renting a SPOT unit which will allow tracking of our progress via the internet by family and friends. I'm slowly gathering the odds and ends to take on the trip and tomorrow I have to get it organized and packed to take with me to Petoskey on Saturday. I'm sure packing the boat will make this more "real". Don has found a website (weatherbouy.com) for placing a virtual buoy in our proposed sailing route to check for temperatures, wind and waves. We checked it out on Easter at his home and I was amazed at the wind speed and wave heights for most of the current week. Nearly every day was red flagged and several days showed waves of 20 feet plus! Hopefully we will not run into those conditions. While sailing with Don on Lake Michigan we have encountered 10' seas on several occasions and it is hard for me to imagine waves twice that height. However, we fully expect to run into both calm boring days and windy challenging situations. We would like to place an order for more of the former and less of the latter! - Rod