You know, I completely forgot that it was Easter weekend. It’s rather difficult to make calls for things like moorage when everyone is off chasing bunny rabbit eggs. So, instead, today was a day of planning – creating shopping lists, prioritizing shopping lists, creating task lists, prioritizing task lists.
Anne is a list maker, a habit that is slowly starting to rub off on me. Currently we are maintaining a list of boat items and tasks in a spreadsheet on Google Sheets, and it has 134 items on it that we’re colour coding. Red for “need to do before sailing at all”; orange means “need to do in the first month”; yellow for “Need to do the first summer”; white is “No deadline planned, though probably over the winter”.
And so we come to our first disagreement. Like 99% of our disagreements it’s kind of a no-event. There’s no anger, no shouting, no resentment. I just disagree with some of the things that she’s prioritized as red and, I’m sure, she will disagree with some of my prioritizations as well. For me, a “red” item is “Does this have to be done before going for a day sail the first time?” Orange is “Does this have to be done before or concurrent with our first multi-day trip?” etc. I want to keep the red things down so that they’re not overwhelming (and so that our new boat isn’t a dock queen for the next 2 months). I want to concentrate on the essentials and then expand from there.
That doesn’t mean we won’t do some of the orange things before we get all the red things done, of course. Some of the red things are, at the moment, only things I can do as Anne is not a mechanic (yet!). So she may be knocking off some orange, yellow, or even white things while I’m cursing at engines or duct work or wiring.
And, yes, I admit that I’ve been persuing the catalogs of B&G and Gill and Raymarine and Furuno looking at the bright shiney things but the boat actually has an electronics suite, so revamping all of that is not in the cards at the moment. I might need to add a Wifi gateway to the system so that my iPad can interface with the data from the helm. The current chart potter at the helm is, by the admission of the current owner, not reliable. There is a second chart plotter on an arm that can be swung into the companionway hatch, but I really do not like that arrangement, so we’ll be doing something about it. Probably an orange or yellow, task, though. Maybe even white.