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......

Viridian gets her bottom cleaned........

An exciting day today.........Viridian was lifted for some underbody maintenance. I had to drive her onto the lift, which was a bit nerve-racking because she is pretty close to the maximum size for the lift and there isn't very much room at the sides. However we managed to get her out successfully without me adding any new dings or scratches.

She will be on the Hard at Port Solent for 3 weeks and during that period we plan to have all the through-hull fittings checked; the hull anti-fouled; the folding prop serviced; and the propellor and hull anodes replaced.

Since we are going to be in the warmer waters of the Mediterranean we are going to use Hempels Tiger Extra anti-foul and I have decided to change the colour of the anti-foul from White to Black. Jan is griping because she doesn't think the boat will look as pretty with Black anti-foul, but everything i have read suggests that Black is much more effective and longer-lasting than White.

Other big news......we now have a departure date!! Our leaving date was always going to be dependent on when/if we managed to let our house. Well, we now have some tenants who want to move in at the beginning of April - so we have our departure date which is 8th April. 7 weeks to go.......Happy Days!!! 

MUSTO are brilliant!

12 weeks to go now and as part of the preparation for our departure I thought it would be a good idea to have my Musto oilskins serviced. Personally, I think that Musto's sail wear clothing is excellent - they make practical, well-designed technical clothing that works very well when the weather gets nasty.....but mine had seen several years good service and were quite worn and faded in colour. They were no longer "glowing" the bright yellow that they had been when they were new. In addition the salopettes were leaking a bit around the groin area - which is something you really don't want on long passages. 

As a minor aside, I can't understand why anyone buys grey or black foul weather gear; in fact I can't really understand why oilskins in such colours even exist! I suppose it must be fashionable - all the top professional crews on TP52's and the like seem to wear various shades of grey. The difference is that when they are racing they are shadowed by innumerable chase boats and support vessels who can locate them and pick up crew pretty rapidly if they fall overboard. If I fall overboard when we are on passage I want to be as visible as possible to my rescuers. It seems insane to choose to wear a grey colour and camouflage yourself in a predominantly grey sea. Day-glo yellow is my favourite colour closely followed by orange or red. Just saying.....

Anyway, back to my Musto oilskins; I contacted Musto on the phone and explained that they were leaking and needed servicing - they gave me details of where and how to send them back. I returned them and hey presto! a few days later I received an e-mail back explaining that the fabric was de-laminating and as a result they weren't able to service or repair them. They went on to explain that because the Gore-tex was guaranteed they would instead send me a new set. Well, since my oilskins were at least 5 years old and the retail price for a new set of Musto HPX Ocean oilskins is currently £1,200 you can only imagine my dismay!

One week later a pair of brand new Musto HPX Ocean salopettes arrived followed the next day by a brand new Musto HPX Ocean jacket. 

Both my visibility and waterproofness have returned.......happy days! Personally I think this is pretty amazing service so if you are torn with indecision when purchasing your next item of foul weather clothing, you will understand why I would strongly recommend that you buy Musto.

16 weeks till departure

Starting to get excited now!......

We were at the London Boat Show on Saturday looking for a few more of the items that we need before our departure. The London show has shrunk considerably over the last few years and if you want to look at sailing boats you really need to go to the Southampton show - but happily we are no longer looking for a boat and it is still quite a useful place to go if you want to look at and compare equipment. We were looking for a Tilley hat (as a belated Christmas present) for Jan and an EPIRB and a Wi-fi booster for Viridian.

We had a successful day, buying Jan's hat and the other two slightly less critical items - an EPIRB (hopefully we won't need it!) and a Wi-fi extender and router. If all works well we should now be able to keep in contact with everyone via the internet and if we run into serious trouble the EPIRB will allow us to send out an alert.

The choice of wi-fi system was quite tricky but eventually we decided on the  MailASail WifiBat booster and their RedBox router. Having decent access to the internet is going to be pretty important for us and these products have had good reviews. The RedBox can accept Wi-fi; or 4G; or an Iridium phone, so hopefully should be perfect for us. I've also heard anecdotally that MailASail provide very good service - I will let you know how they perform.