Final madness.....

Well this is the first time I am posting on the blog and I am pleased to say that I can report that Greg and I have not had a single cross word or row during the 12 hour crossing from Port Solent to Cherbourg. 

Why is this worthy of comment I hear you asking? Well the truth is, we have been rowing at an extreme level for the past month. The stress of dismantling my nest of 30 years, battling with Greg's desire to just go (he ordered a 16 yard skip and was very gung ho about its contents!) I have been clinging to my memories and memorabilia like a limpet on a rock. The final day before we set off was epic. Today in the calm and relaxing atmosphere of the waves, the sea and the sky I found myself reflecting on what actually transpired.

There are some of you who will be receiving weird parcels on Monday. Jenny Cowell you will receive a parcel that looks like a leg of lamb wrapped in a black bin liner. It is actually a bundle of leather remnants and two pairs of lederhosen from our Austrian phase. Why have you received them... because you told me you were planning to make animals from leather ( and I believed you!) and you told me how to clean suede but I forgot the instructions so I've sent them to you for restoration. Sue Johne will have received a belated birthday present. Abi Veevers will have received two books, in separate envelopes with no message but only because they got left behind from the charity shop run and I couldn't bear for them to go on the skip. We only had small envelopes left as Greg had already thrown the whole of the office filing cabinet on the skip. Chris Scott I returned that book you loaned to me 12 years ago. 

And then in the midst of the chaos of packing I made Greg go to the post office with all of this stuff. Actually I'm amazed that didn't create a bigger row. 

My blood pressure did however rise off the scale when the new tenant Alan pitched up in the hope of finding some calm because he was rowing with his wife at their end of things. Alan and Greg then proceeded to compare notes on the unreasonableness of their partners packing and retention habits... when I saw them doing a high five and man hug I went ballistic! So leaving my lovely Thicket Meadows was extremely traumatic. I have had several wobbly and tearful moments of sadness, anger and now joy. As we were crossing the channel today, the sun was out and all of the stress behind us; Lou Reed came on the playlist singing Perfect Day and I cried with happiness. It has been traumatic and doubt filled but now we are actually off...I know its right for both of us at this point in our lives.

Packing my paramotor

I fly a paramotor - a paraglider with a motor; and Jan and I have had some long "discussions" about it and whether it has a place on board Viridian.

Obviously I want to take it; unfortunately Jan is somewhat less enthusiastic. I don't think the problem is that she is worried about whether I crash and hurt myself, it's more that it takes up some space that could more usefully be allocated to something (anything) else.

I think it will be wonderful to fly around some of the places that we visit, here is a video of a recent flight by the river. 

Anyway we have finally agreed that I can dismantle it and store it in the front cabin whilst we are alone on the boat. Here is some time-lapse footage of me breaking down the paramotor - as you can see it ends up quite small

When we have guests on board I will find somewhere ashore to store it. I thought that was a pretty good compromise.

Anyway, although it must be said that I have had one or two mishaps as I have been learning to fly, I am now getting a bit more proficient and a bit more confident - so you can look forward to some video footage from the air.

Getting rid of stuff is hard!

Since we now have a departure date we have started to try and get rid of some of our stuff, but I must warn you that it is hard,...very hard. 

At the moment we live (and have lived for 14 years) in a 4 bedroomed house. Over these years we have accumulated what now seems like a huge amount of stuff, but we are about to move to a smallish boat so there is a vast amount of our belongings that simply won't fit. What do we do with it?

Storage is horribly expensive - i was shocked. You will find that for most furniture if you are travelling for more than a couple of years, then the storage cost will be more than the cost to replace the item with new. We have tried to find friends who have the space to look after our more precious or valuable items, but what to do with the rest?

Well we have no time left (we are leaving next week) so we have decided to give everything away or throw it away. We have laid all our things out and our friends have been invited round to take what they want tomorrow - after that everything goes on the skip. It's a stressful experience because whilst its quite cathartic to get rid of redundant rubbish, its quite traumatic to throw away things that you like and you think are valuable but you have no room to store. 

Jan and I have already almost come to blows about what is worth storing and what should be thrown, no doubt there will be more serious discussion later on in the night. We will get there.....  

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.....       

Good news!.....

We have just heard from the Estate Agents that they have received an offer to rent our house. Hopefully this will go through as planned and if it does so then we hope to be departing on 13th May. Fingers crossed!!

Other good news,.....the bodge repair that I made to the leak has worked. I am surprised, because my DIY work is not usually successful but so far so good. 

I' ve found a leak!

It's really annoying. Viridian went back into the water on Friday and all seemed good.

Chris Russell and his team from Silverwood did an excellent job polishing the topsides and doing the anti-foul. They also replaced all the anodes and checked the skin-fittings. 

Steve Edwards came up from MarineTech in Gosport to fit the RedBox wi-fi booster; replace the depth transponder; and fit fans in all cabins. He did so with his usual meticulous attention to detail.

However whilst all this work was going on I rather stupidly didn't do anything with the (now redundant) forward-facing sonar. We have this unit on board and it worked initially but then ceased working. To be honest, I never used it even when it was working - I couldn't see the point. It's range was so limited that if you were travelling at any speed even if you did notice an unexpected shallow ahead you would have hit it before you had time to react. When it stopped working I thought "c'est la vie" and since I was haemorrhaging cash elsewhere decided that I wouldn't get it repaired or replaced, it wasn't doing any harm - I would just leave it. Well it has now come back to bite me, as these things generally tend to......The through-hull fitting for the transponder is weeping. Not a lot, but just enough to be really irritating.

I should have had the transponder removed and the hole plugged properly whilst Viridian was out of the water, but of course now that she is back in the water that can't be done. I think I am going to have to try and bodge it using some sort of sealant. I will report back and let you know how it goes...

A bit of a setback....

In my last post I was singing a happy song because we had managed to find some tenants to rent our house whilst we are away, but unfortunately that has now all fallen through and we have had to put the house back on the market. The references for the prospective tenants were dreadful - not only did they have a County Court Judgement against them, they had also been evicted from their last rental for non-payment of rent. 

Of course we terminated proceedings with them immediately we found this out, but we have wasted 3 weeks in the meantime. However although it is a pain I guess that we should actually be grateful......it would have been a nightmare trying to evict them if they had stopped paying the rent whilst we were away on the boat.

Anyway our departure date is now in limbo and not only that, but we have to go back to trying to keep the house tidy in case we get a short-notice call from the estate agents telling us that someone wants to view. 

In fact, I have just had a call from the estate agent and we now have a viewing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Fingers crossed......