I have been struggling and mulling for a week now about how to approach this post. I cannot figure out a particularly concise or clever way to approach it so here's the rambling story.

I drove my Dad down to LA a couple of weeks ago on what was supposed to be a two day delivery trip to get him situated down in LA. He was going to live with his sister for a while to be near his friends and doctors.

Almost two weeks later I was still down there and Jacob had joined me when Dad was admitted into the hospital. He doing better now, but the situation was a real shake up.

"Cruising boat, fully equipped, plans changed, must sell" kept flashing through my head as we did the hospital shuffle: hospital, food, hospital, food, sleep, hospital and repeat. Were we going to be stuck down there on this rotation forever? Sell the boat and try to get a job in this terrible economy?

This experience has also given leaving on the cruise a bittersweet tinge. Sure we have a sat phone and the family promises to call if anything happens to anyone, but the logistics of getting back are such that we may not be able to get back in one day, or even two, and by that time will it be too late? The pressure of goodbyes in this situation are almost unbearable, and so I cope by assuming the best-that nothing terrible will happen and we won't be gone that long etc.

Returning to the boat last week from LA felt like being transported to another world. Our leave date is now a flexible date sometime during the week following Monday, Dec 1. We are starting to see a tiny pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel and starting to watch the weather. Obsessively.

We get a fair amount of "you don't have an ________?! You absolutely have to have an ______ or your boat will sink the minute your masthead crosses under the Golden Gate!" While we value everyone's input, sometimes we get the sneaking suspicion that a good portion of these exhortations are based solely on (sometimes limited) personal experience, rather than an objective assessment of need.

The frustration level that we feel during these conversations is inversely proportional to the time left before departure. And since we are now extremely close to departure, we present our list of the Top 5 Things We 'Have to Have' that we don't have!

Now, before you get all outraged, let me say that we would like to have some of the things on this list, but because of time or money we don't have them yet. In fact, we completely reserve the right to add anything on this list as soon as we realize just how wise your advice was :)

1. SSB - Generally people use a SSB or Ham radio for ship-to-ship communication as well as email. We are going with an alternate approach to communications, that used by Beth Leonard and Evans Starzinger. We have a simple stand-alone SSB receiver that we can use to listen to cruising nets, or receive weatherfax, and a satellite phone for data.

2. Chartplotter - We have plenty of GPS units (1 built in, 2 handheld), plenty of paper charts, but no chartplotter...actually this is the thing on the list that I want most. Coincidence that I am also the one who is in charge of navigation?

3. Inflatable Dinghy + Outboard - Don't have them, in fact, we went out of our way to sell a perfectly good rigid inflatable and a somewhat problematic outboard. We do however have a beautiful hard dinghy, that rows great and has a sail kit. Sitting here now I can say that I really like rowing. Ask me again in 3 months.

4. Head - Oh my god! A return to the middle ages! We have no head, instead using the tried, true, and gracefully named 'bucket-and-chuck-it' method.

5. Roller Furling - Pisces originally had a Furlex 200s roller furling unit on the jib. According to the manufacturer this unit is undersized for a boat of Pisces' size, and we can attest to that based on our experience. After spending a memorable hour out on the bowsprit in a good size swell with the jib jammed half-way up the foil, we knew that we needed a new furling unit. Unfortunately, it turns out that furlers are much more expensive than we had envisioned in our happy internal universe. Expensive on the order of many months of living without working. Hence, no furler.

Those are the 5 we hear the most, but I'm sure if you are creative you could add a few to this list.

Our solar panel installation is now done, and we are (semi) officially off-the-grid so that we can flush out any electrical system problems prior to departure.

I had some concerns about the solar, as I wasn't a huge fan of the idea of more stuff hanging on the back of the boat, but once it was all hooked up I was an immediate convert.

Especially now that we are counting amp hours, it's amazing to watch power flowing back in, I can tell that I am going to be obsessively checking the amp meter. Right now we're getting 3 amps in (not enough to cover this computer usage, but hey... :).

We purchased our setup through Wholesale Solar. They were good to work with, and I would definitely go with them again.

We went with a single Kyocera KC65T and a Morningstar ProStar 15M Charge Controller. Both seem to be very well built, and installation was straightforward.

As you can see from the picture, we currently have the panel mounted on our radar arch cross-bar, with the ability to tilt fore and aft. Eventually I would like to add an additional panel, and set them up on the port side arch post (opposite the radar) with a setup similar to Atom's solar tracker.

That however, will have to wait, because now I need to turn my attention to some other projects.

In general I am the type of person who wants to gather as much data as possible before making a decision. My feeling is that most of the time there is a superior option, and if none appears obvious it's because you don't understand the complete picture yet. I'd prefer to defer a decision than make one without feeling entirely comfortable with it. (By the way, this drives Julia absolutely crazy, as she takes the polar opposite approach to making decisions).

The data-driven approach works well a good deal of the time, but there is a certain category of choices where it really falls short. These are the decisions where a major piece of the possible competing outcomes is simply unknowable. A certain sign that you are facing one of these is when you start saying things like "it will probably be fine...but...if it's not it could be a catastrophe."

So now for some nautical detail. The standing rigging (all the wires and fittings that hold the mast upright) has a lifespan somewhere between 10-15 years, depending on use, quality of the original materials, weather, and luck. If you are very diligent (and of course lucky) you might manage to find the signs of impending failure before it actually becomes failure ('TIMBER!').

Our standing rigging is about 8 years old, and we've always planned to replace it as a precautionary measure before leaving. However, after some serious sticker shock after getting a re-rigging quote, we've started wondering whether we really need a new rig...and right there you end up in one hell of a 'who knows' decision making process.

After an evening or two of running in circles on the issue, we decided that we needed expert advice. The problem is, no one really wants to give you an answer one way or the other (which is understandable, because essentially they are saying 'who knows? and I don't want to be the one who said things will be fine if they turn out not to be'). A typical conversation goes like this:

Us: 'So, having looked at the rigging, and given our plans what are your thoughts?'
Rigging Expert: 'Well, everything looks good, there are a few things here and there that should be remedied, but generally everything is good. The materials quality is high, and appears to have been put together well.'
Us: 'Whew, well that's a big relief because...'
Rigging Expert: 'Uh yeah, so like I was saying everything looks okay, but you can't really know, and you wouldn't want to have something happen when you were far from land or access to repairs.'
Us: 'Uh, yeah that's pretty much the reason we came to get your opinion.'
Rigging Expert: 'I'll send you my bill.'