The Burnetts Are NOT Dead; They Are Just in Florida

Mel apologizes for the delay in blog posts.  She knows many of you out there suffering in the frigid wastelands, or those who are working at demanding jobs full time (same thing), anxiously await each of her posts so that you can, at least for 500 words, transport yourself out of hell to a better place, one with spectacular sunsets, beautiful topography, and interesting nomads.  Mel supposes that the reason she hasn’t written in a while is because she feels she is not up to the task of that teleportation to paradise.  The problem is: She is in HELL.  After all, she is PREPPING THE BOAT TO CROSS THE ATLANTIC.

This post is rated PG-13, by the way, for those who let your kids read it.  For language.

Oh yes, while Greg is busy doing important things, like checking the batteries and shit (our port battery  was at 7% capacity after only a year, for Christ’s sake!) Mel is tasked with: Spring cleaning the entire fucking boat. Because she is unskilled labor.  The ol’ MD means nothing around here!

To accomplish this awful task, she and Greg have disemboweled all bilges, forepeaks, and sub-forepeaks.  Damn you Leopard and all of your massive-but-irregular storage!  Let’s just say no guests will be invited onboard for the next week, unless we are fine with them thinking we are MASSIVE HOARDERS.  Here is some domestic advice for those thinking they can live on a boat: if one of you is stressed out with giant piles of shit everywhere (Mel), and the other is perfectly comfortable with this (Greg), just fuck living in a “small house/boat” and live in a mansion where you can properly hide all of that crap instead.

Of course, Mel has learned valuable lessons about boat storage and provisioning in the last eight months of cruising the Caribbean.  While sorting through the endless Sterilite containers, she learned the following: we bought WAY.TOO.MUCH.SUGRU.  I repeat: WAY.TOO.MUCH.SUGRU.  Also, bungees and small lines DO NOT play well together!!!  No! No! No!  See pics.

Here is something that happened the other day.  Mel read the blog post of a guy that was crossing the Atlantic, and one day he noticed a small hole in his Parasailor, the same spinnaker we have.  He thought, “Oh well, let’s just see what happens.”  This is called: DumbassSailorThink.   He sailed for a few more days and then, SURPRISE SURPRISE, finds his Parasailor ripped in half and dragging in the water.  So Mel gets online with Sailrite and orders ripstop tape and 2 yards of orange ripstop nylon.  So that’s how you prep.  You assume you will be dumber than you usually are (because of seasickness and sleep deprivation and shit) and make sure you have all the parts to be crafty enough to make up for it.  Because sails are essentially redheads.  They chafe.

At least we found out that our port rudder had about 30 degrees of play due to a problem fusing with the rudder post BEFORE we crossed the Atlantic.  Hey, maybe that explains the problem we had turning into the current that one time??  Or the problems we had at RUDDER CUT Cay?  Nah!

Of course, Mel went to BEAUTIFUL Vancouver in the interim, to attend a convention of fellow nerd…olgists.  This of course reminded her of how much she loved neurology, and also how much she hated working as a full clinical neurologist.  So she is still having some sort of career crisis.  But that is a post for another day.  She also met with another cool Leopard 48 owner (we are all cool, by the way) who showed her all of the sweet spots to visit in the Med.  Score!

May 4 is the earliest possible time we can get the fuck out of Florida. I mean, we have, like, 35 storage compartments on this thing.  Just so you know.

PS. In case you are wondering, the tone of this post was inspired by Jack Daniels and about 1000 FUCKING NO-SEE-UMS.

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