Weekend #1 of our final period of work came and went in a bit of a soggy flash. Lauren made a huge dent in sorting through our food stores and we did another big shop of cans, pasta and rice to begin building our long term stores. Grant's also been making great progress fitting the final bits of wood trim so that left me to get the fore deck and wheelhouse painted.
This is England though, and I should have known better. All was going well to [.....]
So... this past weekend we moved from the hell hole of a yard we've been stuck in for the past 4.5 years (see muddy low water photos below), to a new, clean, sparkling, nice place to do our last 2 months worth of work. This is how the old marina looked at low tide....
And this is the long pontoon I've walked down just about every weekend for 3 years.... I can't tell you how big the grin on my face was the last time [.....]
Holy sh*t - two months to go today. Can you believe it? I sure can't. I've had a countdown going on our white board at the flat since it was 90-odd weeks to go, and now we're just 2 months away from departure.
This is the big weekend coming up - our move weekend. I have a mate coming up from Cornwall to help this weekend (and also to get some work done on the boat over the coming month) so we're hoping for a run to Cowes on Saturday, fuel up, then back to Chichester Harbour for a night on the hook, before motoring in to the new marina at lunchtime on Monday.
The new [.....]
Having had one of those great days in the office with my American colleagues, where I was yet again questioning the sanity of leaving a six figure City job to live a frugal life sailing around the world, all it took was 26 pages in this month's Yachting World to make me realise how much I can't wait to leave this place.
In the course of those 26 pages, the magazine bemoaned the disappearance of astro navigation and lavished praise on the ridiculous twat-and-pomp-fest that is the Royal Yacht Squadron - bear in mind this is the same publication that has continuously questioned the safety of GPS and electronic flares, and whose editor appeared at a well-attended Bluewater Cruising [.....]
I'm not normally one to recommend books, but do yourself a favour and read this one. Two Swedish guys buy a boat (with minimal sailing experience), learn to sail, and sail around the world. Kinda like the Bumfuzzles, with less pizza.
http://www.braveorstupid.com/ [.....]
With 3 weekends to go, we were hoping to get the paint done before haul out to make life easier. As luck would have it, the weather got sunny, the wind dropped and came from the SW, and the tides were just right.
Portholes taped and ready to go:
Coat #1 done.
Coat #1 (this time in the afternoon sun)
And coat #2 done. To be honest, I was really worried about rolling on the paint again as it turned out [.....]
First up my apologies dear readers, I hadn't realised it was 3 weeks since the last update! How time flies.
Right, what's been happening recently. I spent a cold (minus 25) week out in the US for work and was surprised at how warm the UK was when I returned. This is good news for the next job I have to do on the boat - painting the topsides. In the end I decided to go with that the original blue I painted the boat in back [.....]
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