San Diego: Did We Say We Were Leaving?

By Pearl

Yesterday was a day of last minute preparations. I walked to the grocery store twice, once returning with a bulging pack and once with the 2 additional jars of peanut butter that I forgot the first time, along with a last pint of ice cream to share. In the evening we enjoyed hot showers and gathered up all our clothes for a last look at the inside of a wash machine. While they were being washed we used the wi-fi in the building to download some last-minute back-up charts and apps.

I was finished a little ahead of David and brought the clean laundry back to the boat. As I was putting it away in the forepeak, I felt him step on the boat and heard him say in a deathly voice, "Pearl, sit down. Something terrible has happened." 

With that preparation I was almost relieved when he opened the computer bag and showed me the shattered screen of our tablet. Apparently the zipper on the bag wasn't closed completely and the tablet fell out while he was walking back. He was devastated and overflowing with self-recrimination.

And it is a blow, as the tablet was our central navigation device. We do have back-ups in the form of charts on phones, and on our laptop, but our main chart program for the Pacific Islands isn't available for the laptop. We also have some paper charts, but they're not detailed enough in areas where there are multitudes of islands. Neither of us slept well and our conclusion this morning is that we don't feel comfortable leaving relying from the beginning on the back-ups.

So today will be spent navigating the San Diego bus system instead of the San Diego harbor channel. It's frustrating, but as with David's kidney stone, better now than later.

Hopefully we'll have this resolved in a day or so, but for the moment we no longer have a probable date of departure. I guess this is February and we're starting to feel like Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day.

Arghhh!!!!!