Beyond the obvious, having dinner and brushing your teeth, there are a couple of prudent things to do before the sun goes down. The first is selecting your overnight sail plan. So you check the weather, in this case it should be building, and I expect to see thirty knots plus. Therefore the plan is to reef down. Headsail to reef one, main to reef two. With those in place we are still seeing about seven knots of boat speed. If things get worse we can still reef more, but this should get us through the night.

The second thing you do is a deck walk. You walk the deck and clear out the non-essential stuff, fix any maintenance issues you can. After that, you sit and enjoy the sunset.