Too much to do

We are parked at a marina in the Savannah area.  I'm not quite ready to post a map link yet.  On Wednesday, our very first full day of boat ownership, John met us at Thunderbolt and helped us get Vector moved here.  John handled the delicate maneuvering around the docks, and I drove for most of the rest of the trip.  We have a lot to learn.

Since tying up here, we've been spending all day every day on board, getting things cleaned up , sorted through, stowed, and generally ready for us to move in about a week from now.  We've enjoyed our first cocktails on the deck, and I even went down to the boat one night to see how all the outside lights looked.  But we've been eating and sleeping here on Odyssey, in consideration of the cats, who seem at times to run our lives.

John left a lot of things on board, some useful and others less so.  I went through everything in the engine room, stowing the useful items in plastic bins and organizing them into the vestibule, which will be my workshop.  At one point I came upstairs and announced that John had a filter problem, having found no fewer than two dozen spare filters stashed around the engine room.  Louise turned to me and said, no, he had a cleaning-product problem, as she had found at least 17 spray bottles of cleaning products around the boat, including four different bottle of 409.  We will rib him about it when we see him later, if he does not read it here first.  Seriously, on this boat, it's easy to lose track of things, as there are storage places everywhere, many of which are hard to see.

I am guessing also that he inherited at least some, if not all, of the filters.  Louise organized all the paperwork, most of which dates from the original construction of the boat, and the first owner had ordered $1,100 worth of spare filters.  Unless we get a full load of really bad fuel someplace, I am having a hard time imagining we can ever use all these filters. Of course, one load of bad fuel is all it takes...

Anyway, we've been at it for four days now, and we are still nowhere near ready to move in.  But at least we know where everything is now, and I've been familiarizing myself with the location and operation of all the important systems, so we are ready for our training cruise in ten days.  Last night I curled up with the windlass manual, if that gives you a sense of the excitement.

In a short while we will button things up here and head south in Odyssey.  We will make a stop in Richmond Hill to visit with John and return the car they so generously lent us, and drop off a couple of items that I think he inadvertently left aboard.  Tonight we should be somewhere in the Jacksonville area.  We plan to be at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale Wednesday, so we can have dinner with friends and be ready for the start of Trawler Fest on Thursday morning.