We put more supplies on the boat yesterday. Food, gear, clothes.
Here's a look at what is maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the total we'll
ultimately have on board:
I say we're loading the boat, but the truth is when we arrive in Miami,
we will need to unpack and repack most of it. Right now all the stuff
that shouldn't freeze is being held out, and I'll put that into the car
for the drive down. And the stuff that's already on board is not really
stowed in all available nooks and crannies. The inside of the boat
cabin right now is crammed with things like the mast, rudder, boomkin,
sail for the dinghy, rudder for the dinghy, oars, etc. that will all
come out later. So we plan to spend all of Tuesday the 16th getting
everything in its proper place. I will help . . . but really I will
just marvel at Lilly's organizational genius.
There has been progress on the satellite phone problem. It's not
solved yet, but I think it has been isolated: it's almost surely the
serial-USB adapter. The phone has an antique 9-pin serial port. The
computer doesn't, so to connect them you need a cable that has a serial
plug on one end and a USB plug on the other. This would seem to be the
simplest sort of technology, but apparently Iridium phones are very
particular about just who they will talk with. I have now gone through
two different generic adapters. The first wouldn't even consent to dial
a data call. The second would dial the call, but then hung up at the
"Verifying User Name and Password" part. I have one more adapter on
order, arriving later today, a Tripp Lite USA-HS19, which has been
rumored to work with Iridium phones.
(I need to give a big shout-out here to Ed Wildgoose and Drew Jackson
of Mailasail, the
company that provides us with email compression for the sat phone. They
have exchanged about
20 emails with me troubleshooting this problem. And it's not really
their
problem at all. They are basically giving me tech support for someone
else's product. Ed and Drew -- our gratitude is profound.)
The sat phone problem threw a big stumbling block in our otherwise
smooth preparations. I was thinking how well we had planned and paced
everything . . . until this. It completely overwhelmed my brain for all
of three days, and now I'm coming out of the fog, looking at all my
lists and trying to reorient myself. Lilly has her own lists to try to
get through. As the reality of our departure gets closer, the list of
urgent and impossible tasks seems to grow. We normally experience chaos
and panic just preparing to go away for a week; preparing to leave home
for two months seems to be exponentially worse. But in general . . .
somehow . . . I think we'll still get on the road first thing Sunday
morning, as planned.
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