It's been a week since we finished work and about ten days until we are planning to get down to Falmouth and look for a weather window and cross the Bay of Biscay to A Caruna, Spain. We moved out of our house a week ago and very grateful that we've been able to move into Bens parents before making the transition to full time live-aboards.
Since finishing work, preperation has turned into a full time job. I can't work out how we managed to get everything done while working full time, even now there aren't quite enough hours in the day. Ben's been doing a lot of final work on the boat, engine services, last minute rigging adjustments, black water tanks (he boldly offered to do this one), the list goes on. I've been largely on the admin side of things, writing up some key procedures, last minute shopping lists of essentials and getting my head round the Iridium Go! (the satellite phone) and learning how to download and read the weather forecast efficiently and making sure we are confident with making calls etc. We also met some friends who are off on a similar adventure and had an old liferaft to test, we donned wetsuits thinking that we would be practicing flipping it and hanging out inside....it turned out to be the perfect example of why you should service your liferaft regularly as it didn't actually inflate!
We managed to spend a couple of nights on the boat in Wembury Bay and Kingsand, where we moved a lot of things onboard and started organised the boat to make it functional and liveable. Spending that time on the boat really helped me to connect the preperations with what is actually happening. With a lot of my final preperations taking place from the comfory of a sofa, I was almost losing touch with what I was actually doing and it still didn't feel real. Being on the boat however, really ignited my excitement a lot of my anxiety around what is about to actually happen dissapeared. This is one of the main reasons I love sailing so much, there is very little space for other anxieties to creep in, you are so focussed on life on board - weather, food, sails and your immediate surroundings that your mind just lets go of anything else and switches off to the outside world.
Comments