March 21, 2000 -- K-Mart, I would never have guessed

This morning, having risen unusually early, we headed to the boat and started unpacking the 4 boxes sitting in the main saloon. Surprisingly, this went exceptionally well, and in fairly short order, we had all 4 boxes unpacked. Unfortunately, not everything was put away because we don't have full access to the staterooms yet. We headed out for lunch and just as we pulled into Miami Subs, we received a call from the driver for Inflatable Experts. He told us that he was going to be late and would not get there before 2:30 PM, and it would probably be later. I had visions of another failed attempt to get our dinghy. I called Vicky and explained that picking up the dinghy later would be unacceptable as we had other plans for the rest of the day. She tried to pin this problem on us, until I reminded her that there was supposed to be someone at the West Palm store doing a demo and he was the one that was supposed to pick up the dinghy. She told us at that point that the demo had been canceled and therefor no one was available. I was on the verge of telling her to cancel the deal (Mike had been saying this progressively louder in the background for some time) when she asked me to hold on while she conferred with the West Palm store. She called us back 10 minutes later and told us that someone would be there by 1:30 as promised. At precisely 1:30 PM, the driver showed up and picked up our dinghy. We would not deal with this company again, as their customer service as least to us seems very poor. At 2:00 PM, the holding tank cleaning folks came out and took one look at the tank and informed us that they couldn't do anything until the holding tank inspection plate was opened. They were summarily dismissed from the boat while we put our heads together with our yard supervisor. The riggers showed up to remove the traveler, but couldn't do their work because the headliner wasn't down. Mike stepped up to the plate and removed the headliner for them. Everyone is a specialist, down here and can't do anything outside of their specialty! We then went in search of the holding tank people to find out what size of hole they needed. We checked the holding tank and the hole and decided that we could safely glass the hole without cleaning the tank first. This was a fun time, let me tell you! We left the boat for cooler places. We looked online for information on Dinty Moore products and where we could by them. We finally called Dinty Moore customer service who told us that we could find the Dinty Moore American Classics at K-Mart. Off we went to K-Mart to find them. We found several different flavors of American Classics and wound up buying somewhere around 50 of them. They make great offshore food as they are nice and bland and easy on the stomach. Adding to this, is the fact that you store them on the shelf with no refrigeration, and cook in about 1 to 2 minutes. This allows us to run down, grab it, pop it in the microwave and be back on deck before we hurl! Also they taste like not too bad airline food, so now we are stocked for heading offshore!