Road to recovery

Wednesday the surveyor from our insurance company came to Escape Velocity to assess our loss. Mike McCook thoroughly checked over the boat in all the out of the way places that might have been damaged by a rig failure like ours, crawling into lockers, looking under headliners, inspecting the chain plates, and so on. Following him around and looking through his eyes helped us see things we’d missed before, like the nearly chafed through lacings on our soft-top from when the mainsheet was still attached to the turning block and the boom was slamming back and forth on the side deck; and the chewed up section of rub rail where the entire rig was hanging by the headstay until Jack got the pin pulled out. We’d been looking at the forest — we have no mast! — and Mike helped us see all the individual trees. It was an educational experience, and comforting to know that he cares that our boat will be safe and returned to original condition.

Yesterday we spent a few more hours with Mike asking him a gazillion questions about how we proceed and working out logistics. We’re so lucky to have him as a resource and he’s incredibly generous with his time and patient with us.

We discovered that Mike was scheduled to fly out of Golfito on the same flight as my cousin Arturo.

Arturo wanted to come see us that day but we asked if he could wait a week because we had the surveyor coming and had too much to do. I showed Mike a photo of Arturo and yep, Mike met my cousin before we did. We live a strange life.

Now the big work for Jack and me begins as we work through every tiny detail of our new rig order. Think about it, it’s tough to write down everything that was on the rig without the rig to look at. Once we have everything on order we’ll kick back and start enjoying where we are, but for now, it’s nose to the grindstone while we get this thing in the bag.