2 weeks to go......

Lots has happened since I last posted - and unusually pretty much everything has been good news! 

Firstly the tenants for our house rental have now been confirmed, the contract has been signed and the moving date has been set. They will be moving in on 13th May, so that is the day we will be moving out and setting sail - two weeks from today. Starting to get really excited now......

Next, my daughter Miranda has found a flat in Clapham, South London and moved there yesterday with two of her friends. That is really handy because it means we can move some of our furniture into her flat rather than putting it into storage. I have discovered that storage is shockingly expensive and bearing in mind we are planning on travelling for several years we were debating whether it was worthwhile storing stuff whilst we were away. We had come to the conclusion that for most of our furniture the storage cost would have been well over the replacement cost but this means that we don't have to get rid of it all. 

Another benefit of Miranda's move is that her new landlord is happy for her to take our cat, Suki. What to do with Suki has been a bit of a worry to us - we have had her since she was a kitten, she is now 14 and we are very fond of her. We had discussed taking her with us on the boat - I know that many ships have a ship's cat, but it would have added an extra layer of complication whenever we wished to leave the boat to return to the UK or go exploring so wouldn't have been ideal. This problem has now been resolved.

Next bit of good news....I have fixed the air-conditioning on the boat!! As you will learn, my DIY skills are appalling and the prospect of any maintenance work on the boat fills me with dread. Generally what happens is, I start a job; muck it up comprehensively; and then have to pay a professional to come and remedy the mess I have created and do the job properly. Our air-conditioning system had stopped working because there was an airlock in the pipe for the coolant water so the pump wouldn't prime. After chatting about the problem with various professionals they suggested that I fit a connection to the coolant water pipe from my fresh-water system so I could use this to prime the pump. This sounded like a bit of an unwieldy (and expensive solution) to me so I thought I would try to fix it myself. I decided to try to prime the pump by blasting water from the dockside hose through the water output fitting. It wasn't simple because of course the dockside hose and the water output tube were incompatible sizes, but I managed to manufacture a connection using a cut-off bit of biro. I made the connection, turned on the hose, and to my surprise I saw air bubbles rising from under the boat - it had worked! Problem solved, cost zero, happy days! 

Final bit of good news, I have finished adding guardrail netting to the boat. Jan and I have discussed and planned man overboard recovery should the worst happen - and we have come the conclusion that MOB recovery would be really difficult to do single-handed. Our genoa is so large that furling it on your own would be a mission in any sort of a breeze (and that is generally when MOB situations occur). Trying to furl the genoa whilst keeping an eye on the whereabouts of the casualty in a choppy sea would be pretty much impossible. How to resolve this problem? Don't fall overboard! So I have now added guardrail netting round the boat. It was a long and tedious process but now moving around the deck feels much safer and the netting doesn't look nearly as bad as I expected it to.....