Author: Paul and Claire

Leaving the sinking ship…..a laboratory experiment on yacht crews We spent a few days at the Hamble School of Yachting to gain the Sea Safety, Sea Survival and First Aid Certificates required by the ARC. In the pictures we are learning to abandon ship, deploy a liferaft, minimise cold shock, manage a casualty, righting, boarding and maintaining a liferaft, and to put the human body into shutdown for longer term survival. Sea Survival, taught by ex-military specialist John, was excellent. All crew attended and the teenagers found it to be a brilliant and rewarding experience. Admittedly they no longer want

The Ship’s Cat is not going sailing with us and is moving out having packed his belongings. Crew morale will plummet without the ship’s cat chattering away throughout the day. How many other ‘hobbies’ require the total sheding, or shredding, of one’s daily existence. That’s the jobs gone, cars gone, house gone and now the Cat – there is no going back and the months ‘to go’ have slipped rapidly through weeks and now to hours as time becomes ever more compressed!

The more parts that become obsolescent the more we get used to sourcing materials and making replacements. We are forced to learn more about our boat and develop our own parts. In this case the Lewmar 2000 windlass from 1990 required a new friction ring so the search for a suitable plastic to take the load bearing, that was easily machined and had low friction/excellent bearing qualities took us past nylon and delrin to a new material, Acetal. We have plenty spare for further bearing applications but cutting this at sea would be a challenge. Advanced plastics from Bay Plastics

It was some time sgo that we made the cooker fiddles and we always knew that fitting would be another 5 minute boat job, or about 4 boat hours all going well. Drilling the top mounting holes in sheet steel without being able to run any cooling fluid was a nightmare as the cooker cradle heat hardened and all of our HSS CNC bits found it hard going. Then the need to drill at a lower level necessitated the removal of the cooker hobs, microwave and gimballed cradle. We are now trialling cobalt tip drills.          

Cleaning the keel ready for anti-fouling now that we are within our paint window (less than a month until immersion which is the survival time for Trilux 33 out of the water – the joys of aluminium). Everything and everybody get’s covered in blood red splashing about in the toxic red swimming pool as we take care not to contaminate the ground. High pressure washing didn’t cut it so it’s hard labour with scrubbing pads. When this paint dries on you it can only be explained away as a having been a busy night out in the dark without garlic.

We are finally working on deck and sorting out the garage in some late spring sunshine                     And we are onboarding fuel conditioner for 20,000 litres of diesel, a large where’s-this-going tub of hydraulic oil, and Christmas decorations (we are allowing one box of Christmas bits and baubels)           And as part of the Christmas planning we are adding cockpit harness points with a 6 tonne / 15,000 lb working load which should hold a couple of crew with or without extra turkey (pictured with a swiftly

At long last the watermaker installation is over with the final fitting of the remote control at the chart table. Alongside the outrageously expensive and rather poorly manufactured remote (which was not even squared up on it’s faceplate so the body had to be cut in at a seriously bespoke angle to sit straight in the panel) with a basic 3 way switch. Where’s the remote pressure monitoring and production volume control? We could have made our own switches linked to an RJ45 plug for next to nothing and placed them within the right context on our main switch panel.

The crew were less than enthusiastic with the news that they were to share 27 injections between three of them during the month of June.Thoughts about the sun having brought out the nursing shark with razor teeth jumped to mind. Attempts to colour out the red zones along the route around the world ‘risks’ chart and hand it back to the nurse didn’t work so an alternative mitigation plan was hatched. The re-routing of our journey to avoid the red very high risk areas, the blue high risk areas and the grey definite risk areas left us with a limited

Initial plans for departure are taking shape with the current outlook being a re-launch into the water on the 5th July and at the earliest a departure date of 10th July heading for the Plymouth area. A route via Brest remains a plan B option depending upon the weather patterns.

Fortunately, as propellors get larger over the years, so too does the maintenance crew so perfect proportions are retained