How is it that events in life always seem to conspire to happen at the same moment in time. After waiting so long for the sale of the house to go through, we finally exchanged yesterday, but completion is in just ten days and suddenly everything else needs to happen that week too.

We have been keeping ourselves positive about the never ending delays on the house by telling ourselves that it would mean that instead of going into rented accommodation for a couple of months we could move straight onto the boat and in turn actually living on the boat would mean that everything would get sorted out much more quickly. However now the momentous event is upon us, there is just so much to do! Not just moving from a house we have lived in for nearly eighteen years and organising it’s contents into storage, Rick’s long scheduled First Aid Course is on Sunday and we will be moving onto a yacht at the precise moment the last bits of it’s refit are taking place.

Today I am at Ongley surrounded by ever increasing mountains of boxes and spending frustrating hours on the computer pleading with BT, British Gas or Sky to remind me of my passwords, because I can’t remember on their new system whether it should have capitals, underscores or whatever and whether the secret word was the last favourite pet or one of the six previous ones. In between times I’m hoovering out cupboards disturbing poor spiders that have been living harmlessly at the very back for years and cleaning mould from long hidden crevices in the fridges. In fact having spent quite a few days over the last couple of weeks doing much the same on the boat, I have noticed, that this sell up and sail lark does seem to involve a huge amount of cleaning!

In the mean time Rick is on board Raya ensuring, amongst all the other things that are going on, that we have a plumbing system in working order, that the heating is functioning (worryingly not yet) and today orchestrating the replacement of our old batteries. With each battery weighing over 50kg and eleven batteries on board we have drafted in Matt and some friends to do the heavy lifting, hopefully preserving Rick’s back for all the heavy boxes I am creating for him to move when he gets home in a couple of days.

There is one up side to all this frantic activity, I have had no time to ponder whether I have actually gone mad and that I should be just settling down to an old age of pottering around my beautiful garden and getting my fix of azure tropical seas at a luxury hotel in the Maldives!

Another big step yesterday, the sign writer came to apply the name and registered port to the transom. We’re really pleased with how its come out.

We found choosing the name disproportionately difficult, much worse than choosing the names for our children, we pondered it for nearly two years.

The difficulty arises from several factors, for a start there are an almost limitless number of names that are possible for a boat, real or invented. We wanted ours to be personal to us, it needed to sound nice and to look good when written. And of course, playing in the back of our minds, is the pressure from all those marinas and harbours we had walked around saying to each other “that’s a strange name” or “fancy calling your boat that”.

On top of all this once you find something you like, to have it registered, it has to be unique within the UK. Finally it has to pass the Google search test – one name we came up with turned out to be rather similar to scratch in Spanish and another as a valley in the Game of Thrones.

We spent ages playing around with combinations of Rick and Roz or Rachael and Matt. We scrolled through lists of Constellations, Greek and Roman Goddesses and even song lyrics. We tried words for sea, waves, wind etc. in different languages including harping back to my family roots and searching the Cornish dictionary.

But of course when it came to it we settled on one we had thought of right at the beginning.

Raya was Mathew’s pet name for his sister when as a toddler pronouncing Rachael was too much of a mouthful, it seemed to fit all the parameters and when searched on Google it turns out to be an Arabic girls name meaning – Friend To All.

Perfect.

It was an extremely exciting day yesterday, the mast was stepped and all of a sudden Raya looked like a sailing boat. The place where the mast attaches to the boat is called the mast step and because our Oyster is keel stepped our mast comes into the boat through the deck and sits just below the floor directly above the keel.

Tradition requires that you place the highest valued coin of the realm below the mast for good luck. So the morning started with a two pound coin glued in place on the mast step, then the real work, the process of attaching our mast, began.

It took a very large crane, a very low tide and the extremely competent crew from Harry’s Rig Shop to thread the one and a half tons and twenty three meters of our beautifully refurbished mast through the tight fitting slot on the deck.

It was then a race against the rising tide to attach the shrouds and stays to support the mast, so the crane could be removed before the mast became too high for it to hold. Everyone knew their role, Rick described it as a well choreographed maypole dance, and the crane released the mast safely.

Next came the tasks of sealing the mast, sorting out hundreds of meters of running rigging and connecting the 15 or so cables that run down the centre of the mast from the  antennas, sensors and instruments to the electronics onboard. A day and a half after we started everything was in place and working.

A great job, she looks fantastic.

This week I’m tackling the four day STCW Medical First Aid course for onboard ship. My brain is struggling a bit with studying after so many years but I am finding it really interesting. Having been a swimming coach for ages I have had to renew my lifesaving skills every couple of years, but this course not only takes things quite a bit further, its main focus is on first aid as it applies to being on a yacht.

Even if you are close to land it takes quite a while for help to arrive to a boat and if you are in the middle of an ocean then it could take days or even weeks. So in the absence of a quick response from an ambulance crew, it teaches you how to assess and treat people over a much longer time period. Yesterday was mostly CPR and today I have been bandaging fake gashes and amputations and learning how to splint broken bones.

There has been a lot of conversation about how, what seems fairly straightforward in the classroom, would actually work in the tight confines of a yacht, with a huge sea running and a storm raging. Talking as someone who hasn’t quite got her head around how anyone even manages to produce a simple meal in such conditions, it seems incomprehensible.

So I think the key on our boat must be to work as hard as we can on prevention and then hope that any accidents that do occur happen on hot, sunny, calm days!

Raya is back on the water, hooray, but not quite time for the champagne. Below she’s still in chaos, she has no mast and there are a million jobs left to do, but we are afloat.

We left Kent early this morning, battled through the traffic on the M25 and drove through a blizzard on the M3. We arrived to find Raya already in the slings of the crane and with the Stella Maris boys re-attaching the rudder.

Once securely attached, the crane drove the short distance to the launching dock and Raya touched down on the water at exactly midday. There was a slightly anxious ten minutes while the new hull fittings and seacocks were checked for leaks, but with the bilges dry she was led to her temporary berth on the working dock.

It will be great not to have to climb up a 15ft ladder to get onboard and to have running water at last to do some cleaning. Lovely to be outside even if it is struggling to get much above freezing and, without her mast, she looks like a rather odd motor boat. Good to be one step closer to our goal.

The principals of packing up the house in theory are easy – chuck away, give away, store or pack for the boat. Unfortunately in practice it’s very different, objects that have lurked in the deeper recesses of cupboards suddenly become centre of attention. You know they are perfect candidates for the chuck pile but part of you remembers when they were bought or who gave them to you. Should they be kept?

No!

Okay, well would they like them at the charity shop, should they be recycled? Or is it straight into the skip? With the surprisingly large amount of stuff we seem to have acquired over the years this is quite a task, but the house is now rapidly beginning to look empty.

However, then there is the curious case of Rick’s never emptying shed. The shed, Rick’s pride and joy, has been an integral part of life at West Ongley Farmhouse. From it he has produced everything from built in wardrobes, to salad bowls, to that elusive and vital widget.

Over the past few months, hours have been spent “sorting screws”, numerous cases of tools have accompanied us down to the boat and van loads of equipment, benches and more tools have been transported to a friend, creating an Ongley shed clone.

But somehow the shed still looks full. More effort is obviously needed.

Dozens of times the wheel barrow has been filled and emptied into the skip, piles of wood have been taken by friends, more boxes have been packed and more screws “sorted”.

Yet when I put my head around the door this morning, bizarrely the shed is still full!