It looks like Apollo 11 in here. And I imagine that it feels a bit like that as well. A little place for everything and everything in its place – very tight but efficient.

My INDOOR sea trials are done and I would say that it was a very valuable experience. I learned a lot and I think I need to make this a weekly event – or maybe every two weeks. At 8:00 am on Monday morning I locked myself into WiTHiN parked safe and dry in my shop and crawled out of the sleeping cabin at 6:00 am on Tuesday morning.

I sat in the cockpit and pedaled for 13 to 14 hours, cooked dehydrated scrambled eggs for breakfast, noodles for lunch, pasta primavera for dinner and snacked throughout the day. The food bag that Helen made up for me contained exactly 5000 calories. I think 5000 works out just about right, although I will certainly still loose weight during the Pacific crossing. I am probably burning 500 calories an hour, so today, I figure I will burn a total of (500 x 14 hs) 7000 calories plus my maintenance requirements for a total deficit of around 2000 calories. I will take 90 food bags with me – each bag contains an entire days worth of food and weighs 1.15 kg, and measures 8″ tall, x 4 1/4″ thick x 11″ wide. I want to stack all of the food bags in plastic tube stowed in the bow storage locker. I would need 382 inches, or 31 feet! Yikes! I’ll need to split that into at least two rows. My total food weight should be around 103 kg or 227 pounds. That’s a lot of calories!

I have a little list going of all the things that I need to change – mostly small items like moving a vercro strip. I learned that I do need some kind of JetBoil camp stove holder. The place where I found it safest to boil water is right on top of the stainless steel drive leg flange. During rocky seas, it would be nice to have the stove locked down there. JetBoil has a snap on lid for the water cup, so spilling as the stove rocks around shouldn’t be a problem. I could rig up gimble-like device which would be some way to hang the JetBoil from the ceiling, but I don’t like the idea of the boiling water cup smashing into a wall or me or something.

Overall, the daytime was pretty good. Except for the flood.

I ate lunch in the cabin and decided to spend 30 minutes manually pumping the de-sal before getting back onto the pedals. When I finished, I looked into the cockpit where my water bag was to check to see how much water was in the bag and realized that I had forgotten to plug the fresh water output tube back into the bag! There was 2 liters of water all over the floor of the cockpit. No biggie, but stupid. I cleaned it up with a sponge and re-made the lost water with the electric unit.

For my mind occupying activities, I watched a movie about the Apollo program, an episode of Everest, and an episode of Man Men. I listened to a bit of music, took some photos, a bit of video, composed 2 blog posts and sent out a few Twitter posts.

I went to bed at about 11:00 pm and had some difficulty sleeping. The first issue is that my pad isn’t soft enough.I imagine that I could get used to it, as I have done a fair amount of camping and I have gotten accustomed to sleeping on those camping pads. However, I could be spending a lot of time in the cabin and I want to make sure that it is very comfortable. The other issue I had was the tiny pillow I packed in there. I think I will use the Ocean Sleepware stuff sack to throw my clothes into and use that as a pillow. The last issue was that my Ocean Sleepware sleeping bag was WAY too warm. I was pretty toasty inside the cabin after generating all that body heat throughout the day. I imagine it could feel like a blast furnace in there as I approach Hawaii. I think I could do with a light blanket.