How do you prepare to sail offshore?

For us, we first needed to learn to sail. Once we finished our lessons we quickly realized we needed a sailboat so we could practice sailing. After looking at several sailboats, we settled on a new 2019 Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 440. We spent a few years sailing locally in the San Juan Islands and then decided it was time to retire from our daily jobs and explore and seek out new adventures. We joined the Coho Ho Ho Sailing group and attended their weekly meetings. We have spent 2 years preparing for this trip. The list of items needed seemed endless. Do we need all this stuff? What could possibly go wrong? Well, anything can go wrong at any time. When you are offshore you are the skipper, crew, galley cook, mechanic, doctor, fire fighter, emergency response team, and maybe even the seamstress if a sail blows out and needs repair. How many spare parts do we need and for what systems? Okay, you get the point. We have a lot of stuff to stow in a 44’ boat. Since a sailboat doesn’t necessarily have square storage spaces, items are stored sideways, upside down, etc. You also have to position them so that don’t rattle while underway. Now we need to figure out a logical method for finding all of this stuff. After reading many blogs from experienced sailors we decided to make a map of the storage areas in our boat and number the storage compartments. Next we made an electronic list of items in each storage area and stored the list on Google docs in the event the laptop gets damaged. (Note: Laptops rust fairly quickly in the tropics.) We’ll try this system and see if it works for us. We both need to remember to put things back where we took them out. That will be the biggest challenge!