The Winter Fix

We are now based in a quaint little marina in Ipswich. After the sea-cock debacle we got her shamefully towed across from Harwich and have been at Debbage Yachts Marina ever since. It's full of live-aboards and retired folk moving at that meandering pace we all dream of. People who can follow the yachtie mags advice and 'fix her up over winter', who see nothing better than pottering about in their retirement. Fixing a little thing here, a small part there. Which is great and such a lovely attitude to have, yet doesn't quite apply when you are planning to head off in less than three months and pretty much all major systems are failing to answer to a swift kick. In that case 'The Winter Fix' is not a leisurely and enjoyable weekend hobby, so much as a race against train engineering, frozen pipes and snow to get everything in working order before time well and truly runs out!

The biggie has been the engine. An amazingly helpful local engineer has been aiding Jarvis in his war. To date with Jarvis vs. engine it is Jarvis 0, Engine 1. But now it is two against one and with his guidance and many a late night googling session the young jedi now knows that the end for this arch nemesis is in sight. Everything perishable has been replaced. It has has new elbow joints, alternators, filters, pipes, belts - the fuel injectors have been cleaned and the entire cooling system has been overhauled! And now that is is clean, shiny, and actually starts, it is safe to say that the engine has met its match - Jarvis 1, Engine 1.  Time for the tie breaker. It  will all come down to the test sail! Round 3 coming soon....

Aside from the engine we have found out a lot more about all the little emotional quirks most of our other systems have. We have encountered some very 'funky' electrical wiring - half of which doesn't attach to anything and that, I personally feel, must be cross bred with weeds - every time we pull one out, two more pop up! We have a water pump whose tantrums would rival that of any teenager, a cooker that will only heat at 'warm', and a diesel heater which plays the art of mystery as to how it works a little to well - solution yet to be discovered!

Our work has not ended there. Fixing up Croc Bones has entailed sanding and oiling all the wood on the yacht and making us oh-so-thankful that she is 90% fibreglass. Scrubbing, cleaning and painting every locker, cupboard, nook and cranny we can find and which appear as very unwelcome surprises every time we think we are finished. It is especially challenging when the water you are cleaning with is so cold it steams when you put your hands in it - brrrrrr!

As we have only been coming down for weekends to sort out these little fixes, time and light have been the main challengers. With it getting dark by 4:00pm and not light until 8:00am we loose a lot of time to work outdoors and needing to leave to join the 'coach-train-bus-coach-wait-train-tube' journey home due to never ending rail works means we are off on Sundays by 4:30pm.

Yet despite everything things are on the up - by the next time we go down to the yacht we will be able to give a mighty tick that the engine is now complete and with some help from our friendly engineer we are hoping the oven and heater will be close behind.

Our next challenge is to make all of the new cushions for the aft cabin, sort out having the liferaft and EPERB serviced and officially change the name from Chelsea Flower to Croc Bones. With her dazzling Croc Bones flag being soon to follow. I don't think everyone is convinced with the name yet - but who could not be convinced with a stick figured crocodile!?

Leaving time is getting so much closer now and the trial sails are just round the corner. Thankfully its also getting lighter now and we only have just over a week left of work so soon we can dedicate all the time we need to fixing her up. I don't want to jinx anything and i say this with fingers, toes, arms and legs crossed (makes typing exciting) - but i think we are on track! The end is in sight and through learning many things from all the trials and tribulations i think one must stick out the most.

The Winter Fix is made for the leisurely gentleman not the yachties on a countdown. It lends itself to words like 'potter', 'amble' and 'slow', not 'rush' ,'deadline' and 'i know its minus 3 but we still need to clean it'. The Winter Fix in my opinion is best kept as one of those nice things to read about in the magazines when you are warm and toasty indoors. Ahhhh well, it would be nice - anyway must get the gloves on. There is a left lazzerete needing a scrub with my name on it!

I see the sea... but not the seacocks

We are now the proud owners of 'Croc Bones'. We have had her registered into our name (£80 for a laminated bit of paper.. hummm), received the final documents confirming the sale and even got the keys to open the vast multitude of locks she is bound with making her look like a floating Fort Knox!

Now we needed to take her to what will be her home for the winter until we set off in Feb. Only a short sail (about 25 nm) from Tollesbury to Harwich, we estimated that it would take us 5 hours with the tide. The guy who we are renting the buoy off had given us a clear indication of its location and we felt prepared and excited to get going. Everything had gone so amazingly smoothly to date, what could go wrong now!?  

What famous last words to have spoken... 

It was an early rise on Saturday morning; Jarvis rushing to Sainsburys to quickly buy and fill up a Petrol Can for the Dingy, and me noting down an intricate combination of train and bus times to ensure that we could get to little ol' Tollesbury… the tiny village of only 3 buses a day.. no matter what rail engineering/delays the British Transport system could throw at us!

We dodged station closures and chavs and made it, problem free to find our nice new shiny Wetline ECO 260 Dingy, and Suzuki Outboard waiting for us at the Marine office. We set everything up, popped it in the water and raced off to go out to Croc Bones, only to find we had not taken into account the amount of tide you need to get out of the sill at the Marina entrance and found ourselves inches away from clogging up the new outboard with thick black mud!

So we waited and explored the little village (which had by far the biggest sunflowers we had ever seen... at least 8 ft. tall) and two hours later set off again and brought ourselves up to Croc Bones! Wahooo we made it! First job done.

We spent a few hours poking around – checking the gas and electrics, making sure the engine would start and finding where everything was then exhaustion kicked in and we made it an early night to prepare for the 6:45am start (super early for us) the next day.

The most beautiful amber and purple sunrise greeted us in the morning, making the fresh morning air and the awkward first night sleep a lot more bearable. We plotted our course and prepared the boat to leave – Jarvis dropping the Buoy and me on the helm.  We had tentatively put the main sail up with a third reef in just in case there was a problem with the engine and lucky we did as not 5 minutes from dropping the buoy our engine shot up a piercing screech, bursts of white smoke and a thick burnt rubber smell.

I quickly killed the engine and pulled the hatch to let it cool down – we had no clue as to the problem and with the gale warnings that had been being forecast on the radio becoming a reality, it was starting to get a bit stressful.

The wind picked up and hit 35 knots, all going over tide making it very difficult to get down into the engine bay to find out the problem. Taking turns at peeking in we could see that a pipe had completely blown off and saw the cause of all the problems. In our haste to get going we hadn’t check the engine sea-cocks! They were all closed.  Rookie Error!! We quickly opened them and attempted the engine again whilst underway but it would only idle... poorly engine.

We sailed into Harwich a lot later than intended, feeling rather sick and miserable. Yet spotting our buoy we perked up and decided that with the wind in our favour we should be able to sail onto it – drama over. However just as we got within reach the wind changed direction and we had to quickly drop anchor where we were.

It was time to hang our heads in shame and call the coast guard to pull us all of 20 metres to our buoy – so near, yet so far!

Challenge one completed – mistakes made, muscles sore but now we have the task of fixing the engine and will be wiser for it! Challenge two, here we come!!

Buying a Boat

Spontaneous is definitely a word I would use to describe the relationship of Jarvis and I to date.

• November 2008 – Meet at work
• May 2009 – Quit jobs and move to Spain
• June 2009 – Fly to Greece. Work and live together for 4 months as a Skipper & Hostess Flotilla team – especially random as I had never stepped foot on a yacht before.

One sunny day in September, when the Sailing season is drawing to a close…

“This has be amazing, wouldn’t it be great if we could do this all the time… y’know just buy a yacht and sail around the world”
“Would be brilliant… erm, shall we? “
“Absolutely…*sighs & laughter* … we could work for a year to earn the money and then just go, ahh that would be the life”

One year later…August 2010.

We have spent a year saving and researching, planning and dreaming, doing courses and getting skills up to scratch – trying to convince family and friends that yes we serious about this and no we are not crazy. The plan, as loosely formed as we had it knowing in brutal honesty, NOTHING, about long term sailing or anything was that we would need to look at the following:-

1)      Boat investigation:- Types, capabilities, size, cost

2)      Routes – when to go, where to go and how best to get there

3)      And the rest… how to victualise, how much money would we need, what to take with us, what we need to buy, where to keep the yacht, timings, crew needed and a multitude of other things that didn’t pop up in the wonderful bubble of “ let’s buy a yacht and sail around the world”

All with the aim of leaving in Feb 2011! (Yes almost completely wrong time of year – why not go in August, honest answer is we are impatient and want to go ASAP)

One thing we had thought about was WHEN we needed to have the yacht by. No sooner that Christmas 2010 if we are off in Feb was the plan, yet with a years’ worth of trying to bulk save causing us to revert to hermits, evening pleasures turned to looking for that yacht we could call home.

We had managed to narrow the type of yacht based on our price range down to:-

1)      Trident – Voyager or Warrior, 35

2)      Nickleson 35

At first it was just one of those simple pleasures that keeps you on track of your goal, and they were all over priced or so far away that it gave us a great excuse to not go see them… until Jarvis spotted a Trident Warrior nestling in Tollesbury marina…

40 minutes from my parents’ house in Essex, under budget and the boat had actually done the route we needed it for… well one little peek couldn’t hurt right?

It turned out to be perfect. Extremely undervalued, contained all of the nav gear we could want and MUCH more, plus the guy who owned her liked us and our plan and offered to ‘throw in’ the entire Caribbean charts he had, both paper AND electronic. Now that is a couple of grand’s worth of ‘throwing in’ there, and to be honest it all seemed too good to be true. We surely couldn’t be those people who buy the first thing they see. It’s a lesson we are all told when purchasing ANYTHING. There had to be something we were missing. It was time to shop around.

Trip to Exeter to view a Trident Voyager – £10K more expensive, all nav gear at least 5 years out of date, plus the corker for us being a covered up rip in the hull. No thank you!

Next trip was planned to go to Wales to see another Trident, but we received an email that day telling us the Tollesbury Yacht had had an offer, the owner hadn’t accepted but would a second offer be made?

Decision time – to buy or not to buy.

We decided to go for it. Spontaneity or recklessness at its best. We put a deposit down, went out for a trial sail and had her surveyed. The wait on the results for the survey was incredibly painful. Were we going to find out that we had made a big mistake!
To our great surprise and unashamed joy – she was in excellent condition and, I quote, “could be used to go on a blue water long-term cruise tomorrow”
Job done. Yacht purchased. Now as it stands we have 5 months until we leave and nothing else sorted, but that’s surely the hardest part done right?