This weekend was all about checking out safety systems onboard Utopia. We plan to take her to St. Petersburg the last weekend in December. It is roughly a 150 mile passage which could take 30 hours to complete. We've crossed the gulf three times so far, each time with a total crew of four. This time it will mostly likely be just the two of us, so I am taking a closer look at our safety items.
Starting out with double checking the coast guard required items and reviewing a list of where those items can be found, we then created some checklists of things to do before the passage. This exercise was good for discussing various scenarios and what equipment is needed for this passage vs. others we will take in the future.
One big improvement from the last passage is that we have a new dinghy. It will serve as our evacuation vessel if needed, and is much more reliable than Patches was.
Some of the safety items we looked into include
checking fire extinguishers
testing navigation and anchor lights (forward nav lights needed a little tap to work)
making sure the windless still works
reviewing locations of safety items
finding and checking CO & smoke detectors
charging hand held VHF and portable lights
updating charts in chart plotter
reviewing what is needed in the ditch bag.
Interestingly enough, the ditch bag generated a lot of discussion. During our passage up to North Florida, I did not fill up the bag, but had printed a list of items that would need to place into the bag should an issue arise. We had four people on that trip and the list provided the location of the safety items should we need to evacuate. However, for this trip, with a short-handed crew (and hearing Tapio Lehtinen's recent story), I feel better having the bag ditch ready.
A really nice bag came with the boat when we purchased her last year. The prior owner's check list is still in it. We'll use his list and our own to figure out what to place in the bag now, and what we can add in case of an emergency. It is a balance of how much extra gear should be purchased vs. do we really need to buy a redundant object to sit in a bag that hopefully is never used.
Yikes, today marks about 20 days left for Utopia to live in Shell Point. Over the next few weeks we will work on our offshore passage check list and continue our what if discussions. As we get closer to the end of the month, we will need to evaluate weather and route planning.
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