Today's Daily Double is... the Bahamas plan!

The dream has lived in a browser tab for years, boat listings at midnight, a chart of the Abacos I never close. Today it became a document. Al and I sat down at the kitchen table with the coffee going cold and wrote passage plan v1, with sections and everything.

The spec: 35 to 38 feet, an east coast boat, draft five foot six or under, because the water over the banks is skinny and I want to be able to watch my own anchor set from the bow. We buy her in person. Drive east, put hands on every through-hull, smell the bilge, no wiring money to a boat I've never stood on. Then south down the coast, wait on weather, cross the stream in winter when a window opens between northers, down the banks to the Exumas, swing on the hook, back north by June before hurricane season gets going. Lady comes (that was never a question, but now she's a line item, the Bahamas wants a pet permit for her and it costs about as much as a decent sandwich). And the islands cut their cruising fees this spring, which I choose to read as a good sign.

The Al part is the real engineering. I bring the wanting and she brings the how, so the plan is rails instead of vibes: a kitty with a hard line drawn on it and we turn for home if we hit it, checkpoints where turning back is written in as a win and not a failure, and a checklist with 88 boxes on it (I counted). Rails are what keep a dream from turning into a coast guard anecdote.

Correction department: the sailing course in two weeks is ASA 103, not 105 like I keep telling people. I've been rounding up my own competence, which is exactly the habit the checklist exists to kill.

Tonight Lady is asleep on the rug with her paws twitching, and the tide is ticking against the pilings under the floor, and somewhere on the east coast there's a boat that doesn't know a thing about us yet. We'll see.