Summertime Voyage

We finally hoisted sails and Summertime moved through the water. We decided to have a gentle first day out and stay fairly local as advised by the rigger/Professor. Do some sea trials to expose any problems was his sage adviceI. It is funny that no matter how hard you try to get rigging a boat right, it is not until you actually use things that you work out what you got wrong. Sheets trapped under jack stays, Halyards attached outside sheets, halyards not running right and impeding each other, not enough cleats on the mast. This season I have changed the main sail reefing system. The existing system was what is known as single line reefing, where one line runs from the boom, up to the first reefing point at the aft end of the sail, back down to the end of the boom, inside the boom to the front, up to the forward reefing point on the sail and then down to a block at the base of the mast and back to the cockpit. It is a good system if everything runs well but with age comes friction and ...

I admit to some blog negligence. It is a week since the last entry.  This has been partly due to a strange thing that seems to have happened to time.  Sometimes the day seems to go on for ever with nothing happening, and the minutes and hours slowly tick by. And then you realise that several days have gone into the past, with almost no memory of them. The dreary, dusty days drag on and on. I am led to believe that the perception of time relates to the laying down of new memories. So the journey to a new place seems longer than the journey back. Anyway just logging the day of the week becomes difficult. Anyway things have now occurred. Finally the day arrived to get the keel put back on. The first attempt failed when it was realised that one of the new studs was too short. An emergency call was made to the engineers and a new rod was threaded overnight. Impressive and an indication of intent. At the allotted time the next day things suddenly started to happen. The keel was dres...

On the technical side, it has been slow. Very slow. It is difficult to describe the frustration of nothing happening. They seem to have got into a mind set that if something happens occasionally that will just about stop the client going into a rage. So something happens about once a week. The mast comes off, some visits to inspect the Another visit to suck teeth a bit more. A welfare visit occurs. Any way we are just about keeping it together, just about. Unlike this lot.  Following the successful encounter with the Surveyor we were somewhat buoyed up but it has not really resulted in any acceleration of the rate of events. However finally the day arrived to remove the keel. This is the most high risk part of the process. There is a young US couple called the Evans’s who do a video blog of them restoring a Beneteau 49.  This was an insurance right off following a grounding. They had a huge job of work to do but one of their main calamities was, when the keel was removed, a ...

So the big day finally arrived, our insurance survey. A nervous tummy day! It was clearly a bit of an important undertaking for the surveyor, who will have undergone a four day trip to perform it. I don’t know exactly how much that will have cost but it would represent a substantial part of the overall bill for our project. We had been in communication and his flight from Istanbul was due to land at 13.20 and he expected to be with us around 15.00hrs. The boat was duly tidied and organised so it presented its best perspective. The floor boards were lifted, the fuel tank exposed and all was prepared. At 14.50 we proceeded up to the security gate to await his arrival. No sign of him. I wondered if we could have missed each other in transit and returned to the boat. We waited some more. He was about an hour late and I was becoming a little concerned as to whether there had been some sort of misunderstanding. I had sent him the exact address of the Marina and recommended the transfer firm ...