It’s Commissioning Week for Tortuga, coming out from a long winter’s nap, dipped gently back into the still chilly waters of Lake Michigan, and painstakingly reassembled. This is always a fun time of year as we get reacquainted with our boat, remembering adventures from only a few months ago.

The standing and running rigging went up earlier in the week, the mast was plumbed and tuned, and all of the 17 lines ran back to the cockpit into their appropriate clutches. All of the control lines run underneath the relatively inaccessible coachroof, so if a routing gets lost it’s an adventure trying to make it right.

Aside from keeping copious written engineering notes in the logbook, we use an app called Wunderlist to keep track of boat projects. We have lists for commissioning, other lists for stuff that we want to do during the season that are not so pressing, and also a long-term list of dream modifications and improvements (my favorite).