We lifted out 8 days before the last flight out of Preveza for UK. That should give us plenty of time, we thought when we booked it in April. Haha! Wrong! OK, so we hadn’t planned on all the electronics work. Or on the mast having to come down, getting insurance quotes etc. But where have the days gone?
Andy’s onboard Wednesday to Saturday fitting the electronics. He & Jim set it all up in their office in Port Solent before shipping it out to Cleo, so it’s already configured with the boat details and as a system. He can’t put the new wiring into the mast or mount the wind sensor and radar on it because there’s no mast there. But he leaves all the cables and connectors ready and labelled. A magic moment when he powers it all up and gives me a brief driving lesson. It looks fantastic and it’s incredibly frustrating not to be able to sit and play with it. I’ll have to wait til next April.
We wave Andy off on Sunday and get to work. We only have 3 days left. There are strong winds and rain forecast from tonight, so we want to get the cockpit covered before then. The sprayhood and bimini covers come off and are bagged up in the forecabin. We remember that one of the sprayhood zips broke last April, and Mary sewed it together – we cut the stitching and make a note to get it repaired. We dismantle and bag the bimini frame and fold the sprayhood frame back onto the windscreen. Now the tarpaulin, which John finally managed to buy in Preveza. It’s good strong material that shouldn’t shred. We have lengths of rope ready to tie it down onto the guardrails. Now all we have to do is to hang it over the boom . . .
Ah, without a mast, we have no boom. (The boom is an aluminium tube attached to the back of the mast, that comes back at right angles to the mast and lies under the bottom of the mainsail.) To be accurate, we have a boom, but it’s lying along the sidedeck, resting on fenders. (And, we later discover, blocking access to the warp locker and the locker where the bucket & hose live. We just about manage to get at what we need.)
A Tent without a Boom is like trying to put a roof on a house with only one wall. At the front it’s held up by the windscreen. It then slopes down towards the deck at the back of the cockpit. We tie it all down – it’s the best we can manage without time to work out a better plan. As it starts to rain, it’s quite a manoeuvre crawling in and out under the back, dripping wet. But, at the front of the cockpit at least, there’s room to sit in a mostly dry spot.
Some jobs we have to leave (like washing the fenders) and we focus on the essentials, frantically stowing things wherever we can. The saloon’s full of boxes – bits of rigging, the new radar and wind sensor, all waiting for the new mast. Empty the fridge. Isolate the batteries. Pack. Stow. John tapes over the toerail (a teak strip that runs along the edge of the sidedeck where it joins the hull) – we’ve been told this may be the source of some of our leaks and the sealant certainly looks shot. A job for next season and the tape may stop too much rain getting in.
I get the cockpit cushion covers washed and dried before the rain starts. They come up beautifully and the only puzzle is fitting the right cover to the right cushion – they’re subtly different shapes to fit the cockpit!
For Monday and Tuesday nights we’re booked into a room at Cleo, so we get our luggage over there to give us more space. I strip our bed, and load it all into a machine. Finally the dryer comes free (it’s pouring with rain, so the washing lines hang empty and dripping.) By Monday evening the drying cycle’s finished, but it’s all still quite damp. I have no more change for the dryer so we drape sheets and duvet covers over the wardrobe doors in our room. On Tuesday the bedding’s dry enough to stow away onboard. And, thankfully, it’s stopped raining and everything’s starting to dry out.
Clothes and the duvet are vacuum bagged. IBA will take the mattress and cockpit cushions away to store in a dry environment. They’ll also winterize and store the outboard motor and will remove the batteries, keeping them hooked up and monitored. They’ve already washed and flaked the anchor chain onto a wooden pallet under the bow, with a plastic bottle for rat prevention. They’ll decommission the engine and then decommission and service it before we return. They’ll flush and treat our holding tanks and send us a report on what needs doing. We’ve set up 3 dehumidifiers with salt; IBA will empty and reset them as needed.
What else? What have we forgotten? We leave 2 sets of keys with Cleopatra – one for them and Waypoint, one for IBA.
Finally, on Tuesday evening, we do a final check, look round for the last time and lock the companionway. A last check on deck, then down the ladder for the last time this year.
“Goodbye LouLouDitsi. You’ll be well looked after, you know everyone from IBA. Stay safe, thank you and we’ll see you in April.”
Our mood is subdued as we walk across the boatyard to our room.
