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 Seminar and had the cheek to tell everyone to "be careful of younger crew, as they're likely to fall asleep on watch". When I say everyone, I mean a room full of geriatrics who would struggle to go through an average night without having to empty their colostomy bags umpteen times.

The great British empire is over, yet they cling on to their once brilliant/now pitiful military, appalling weather (seasons? ha!) and the past that is well, that past. Astro navigation is outdated, GPS is the future (the world accepts it, so why can't the British?), any form of progress in leisure boating, and if I have to deal with one more "I'm off shooting / yachting / etc this weekend" twat, I'll break his red trouser wearing legs.

Yes, I have made some amazing friends in my time here but after eleven long years, we're leaving in 9.5 weeks and I, for one, couldn't be happier.

/off to the boat tomorrow to continue preparing it for our trip....

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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/

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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 very streaky and crap last time. This time however, I started rolling at 07:00 (before the wind piped up and the sun came out), used 10% of the correct thinners and taped a 9" roller to a book hook, allowing me to do paint runs the height of the hull. Voila! A decent finish. It's not glassy smooth like a production yacht, but I'm happy with it.. which is the first time I've been happy with the colour of the boat (after it was white, black, grey, light blue, dark blue, and now this blue).

With the painting done, I was keen to get a hatch installed on the foredeck so we could use the anchor locker to also store our fenders.

With blue water sailing, the less holes in the deck, the better. I fitted the stainless pipe (you can see just in front of the windlass) as the new drop for the chain and will fill in the other one (which you can see at the base of the windlass).

New foredeck configuration.

The dinghy's also been leaking since we shortened it, so I got to work filling the busted / leaking rivets.

Last but not least, the new steering is going to end up going on ebay. I was testing it last weekend and managed to snap the chain as it couldn't overpower the existing internal steering. The idea is to now move the internal heavy duty steering onto the aft deck, and sell all that stuff I bought at the back end of last year and only just finishing installing. Aargh.

So there we have it folks.... 2 weeks 'til haulout and we've effectively done everything we had to do before hauling. I've cleaned the forward cabin and sold off a lot of our spare anti-foul paint, 12V fans, etc etc and also went over to the new marina on Saturday eve to check out the layout.

I had to deal with more morons this week when selling stuff as well - because I wouldn't accept one fellow's offer, he decided to act like a petulant child and I ended up pulling the ads and just leaving it on ebay... Honestly, I just don't get some people.

Anyway, enough of that. Next weekend I'm going to do a few last bits & bobs (lock nuts on the engine controls, fitting a new solar panel controller, tweaking a couple of bits here & there) then it's the final countdown 'til we leave...

10 weeks 'til departure.

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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 in 2013. Anyways, paint ordered (and delivered), all imperfections in the topsides filled and faired, and now it's just a case of waiting for a sunny day with minimal wind. That's looking to be the next two weekends, which is great given we're moving marinas in three weeks.

Yep, that's right - just three weekends and we're leaving the miserable boatyard we've been in for the past 4.5 years. I'm hoping we can get a sail in on the weekend we leave, refuel the boat and get a BBQ going on the Sunday before we haul out on the Monday.

What else... the job lists continues to shrink. I finally got around to fitting the extra sheaves for the aft steering, only to find the steering doesn't seem to have enough grunt to move the rudder and the chain snapped in protest. Great. So... I'm likely going to pull the lot out this weekend and when we haul out, move the wheelhouse steering out to the aft deck. Risky plan with 2 3/4 months to go? Indeed. But we ran the work list and figures last night and I'm confident I could smash it out in a weekend, and we know the system works.

So what does that leave to do? Paint the topsides over the next two weekends, haul out, re-do the rig, paint the deck and anti-foul, and fit a few odds & ends.

Oh yeh (and stop me if I've mentioned this before), Lauren found a photo of me from the last Round the Island Race, helming Rob's boat Arrow (that'd be me pointing, probably at someone about to t-bone us):

76 days to go.
 

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