As our leaving date approaches, at a seemingly ever accelerated pace, life has become a matter of trying to get as much done each day as possible. We end the day comparing notes and reporting how many things we have managed to tick off one or other of the to do lists. We are beginning to realise that we can’t leave with absolutely all the i’s dotted and every t crossed and that if we stayed until everything was done we would probably never actually go.

One big tick this week was the completion of the First Aid kit, we are now officially a floating hospital! It has been a mammoth task trying to decide exactly what to take with us and I have to thank our Doctor friend Peter and his colleagues for all the work they have put into getting everything together for us. We all feel that we have probably far too much stuff and hope that we will never need any of it, but nobody will be able to accuse us of not being prepared. I have to also say a big thanks to Peters wife Joanna who must have spent hours bagging and labelling everything up, the First Aid boxes are definitely the most organised part of the boat. No pressure with all the spares then Rick!

Another bit of excitement was getting the new cockpit table onboard yesterday, it really makes Raya look finished. We have had plenty of visitors over the last couple of weeks and with all this warm weather have been eating on deck, from our laps, off towels as table cloths and from Ricks work bench. Typically the moment we have a proper table the temperature has dropped and today we ate lunch below. Never mind it looks great and will be in full use very soon.

More ticks appeared as we ordered new prescription sunglasses, Rick sorted out his phone contract, we bought four light weight quilts and various other household bits and continued to fight through the piles of paperwork that still hang over us. Rick replaced the wire drops in the davits with Dyneema and spliced new harnesses and I have started a more detailed passage plan.

I think we are beginning to feel a bit jaded by all this preparation, feels like it’s time to go.

We had a busy but good Easter weekend, Rachael came up from Cardiff to help move furniture into the new rental property, have a sail and generally inspect the new floating family home. It was lovely to see her and both she and Matt worked extremely hard, I can’t remember the last time we worked just the four of us together but it seems we can still pull together as a great team.

Robyn joined us for the family sail, quite an auspicious event, it must be ten years since we have all been on a boat together. Unfortunately the weather didn’t live up to the occasion, the sun struggled and broke through the clouds occasionally but it was decidedly chilly, note the interesting head wear, and there was barely a breath of wind. Luckily we had nowhere particular to be and so could go where the best of the light winds took us.

In contrast, yesterday and today we have had our first days of real warmth so far this spring. It felt good to have the sun on my face, the hatches open airing the boat and shock of shocks, to be wearing a T-shirt instead of a fleece and to swap my sail boots for deck shoes.

Definitely a day to work outside and it was the lazarette, the large locker at the stern of the boat, that had our full attention today. As every nook and cranny of the boat needs to be used to its full potential and with the lazarette being about 8ft long, 3ft wide and 4ft deep it is essential that it is well organised. We took everything out, lines, fenders, brushes, jerry cans and much more, sorted, cleaned and tested as necessary before putting it hopefully more logically back in.

As the afternoon temperature rose and with the warm days ahead in the front of our minds, we left out and cleaned the poles for the Bimini so we could test the new canvas cover. It took a couple of hours to work it all out, amusing those around us as we struggled with poles, ropes and canvas, but we got it up eventually and great it looked too, Dolphin sails have done a fantastic job.  

Only around four weeks until our departure date and sipping a glass of wine as the sun begins to set we have the feeling that everything is coming together, or is that just an illusion cast by the sunshine? Plenty still to do!

It is hard to explain just how difficult it is turning out to be, to administratively disconnect ourselves from our old life. As I gradually work my way through the process, each time I try to fill out an online form or try to sort something out on the phone it is increasingly complicated. We no longer fit the tick box world of the big companies.

To start with it is impossible to do anything without an address, anything! My sister has kindly become my own private PO Box number and Postmaster forwarding mail and scanning documents almost daily. Stella Maris will gladly except boxes full of online orders and pass on mail and friends are acting as couriers, but still I have at least one parcel lost in the ether of online delivery and a cheque lost in a closed account.

The banking and utility firms can’t cope with us closing accounts, paying off loans or cancelling insurance policies, “but what have we done wrong” they wail, “how can we temp you back”, “how can you possibly survive without us?” But ask them to do something slightly unusual and it’s always a case of “computer says no”, “what do you mean you don’t have three contact telephone numbers”, “no we can’t send mail anywhere but you’re official address, even if you aren’t there and we have spent the past hour asking you security questions” and “no my brain isn’t big enough to stray from the script on the screen in front of me”.

To compound matters our phone signal and Internet speed in the marina aren’t brilliant so things are often frustratingly slow and that, I guess, is something we will have to get use to. Despite the time and money we have spent setting up the boats satellite and network systems, the days of the efficient home hub are behind us.

It is the small independent businesses that have become our heroes, happy to bend their procedure to help someone who doesn’t fit the norm, a real person that answers the phone without pressing 65 buttons first and rarely a dictating computer in sight.

One exciting parcel that has made it to the boat, with the help of the friends courier service, is the ARC (Atlantic Crossing for Cruisers) 2015 manual. Enclosed is the ARC flag, another flag to add to our ever increasing collection of courtesy flags, signal flags and pennants. Who’d have thought a couple of months ago we would need a whole cupboard just for flags!

When we moved on board a few weeks ago we quickly made the salon and aft cabin comfortable and, on the surface at least, reasonably organised. This however has been at the expense of the forward cabin where anything we have yet to find a home for has been dumped. The bunk bed cabin has rapidly taken on the role of Rick’s boat shed. Now anyone who read my earlier blog, The Curious Case of the Never Emptying Shed will appreciate that this is a bit of a worry.

With guests soon joining us to stay overnight the time has come to get sorted. By yachting standards Raya has a lot of storage space, but a lot of it is under sofa cushions, under beds and under the floor in the bilges, so not immediately accessible. Many of the the cupboards are stuffed full of spares that came with her from her previous life and things that “looked useful” from the refit and during the move. The task this weekend was to work our way through everything, finding it a home and recording where it is on the Ipad master inventory.

With some items the first step has to be actually working out what they are and then, how often we might need them. The less recognisable and the less regularly used an item the deeper in storage they can go. Tools have to compete with food and first aid supplies with engine spares for the most easily accessed areas. And of course all of this is guess work because we won’t really know what or how we will use things until we get going.

However as is the way with these things, not much organising has actually got done, everything seems to take much longer on a boat and distractions are plentiful.

Today the forecast grey, cold day turned out to be warm and sunny, so we abandoned the mess to enjoy the sunshine by working on jobs outside.

One of these was to service a winch. a dirty and slightly daunting job with dozens of interlocking pieces, each coated in thick grease. We seem to be using copious amounts of paper towel for every job, never mind the food and spares, the question is can we find enough storage space for all the kitchen towel we will need to get us around the world.

Eventually, cleaned up and one more roll of paper towel down, the innards of the winch lay polished and gleaming on the salon table, let’s hope Rick can remember how to get it back together!

Tomorrows jobs – sort out storage and reassemble winch. Oh yes, and the heating engineer is coming back, the air-conditioning is being serviced, the riggers are hopefully sorting a problem with the mast furler, the last blind is being put in place in the salon, the Editor of Sailing Today is coming to talk to us, I have to sort out a tenancy agreement on the new buy to let house that finally completed last week and then of course we need to buy more kitchen roll.

Thursday we took Raya out for her first shake down sail, well motor, as it turned out. The first step was to take her round to a dock, at 90 degrees to ours, so as to get her at a better angle to the wind to allow us to bend on the main sail. When we bought Raya the foil in the inmast furling system was broken and the main sail was being repaired at the sailmaker, so this was the first time we had got the main out of its wrapper.  It has battens, basically sticks that run vertically at intervals up the sail, and we had our worries that they weren’t such a great idea for the type of short handed sailing we were planning on doing. The main went into the foil and hoisted really smoothly but putting in the battens was a different matter. With her main up Raya snatched at her lines eager to sail off, the batterns proved to be as troublesome as anticipated and finally with the wind freshening we furled the sail without them and motored off towards Southampton Water to calibrate the electronic instruments and give the engine a work out.

To reach anywhere from Shamrock Quay, you have to sail down the Itchen River and under Itchen Bridge. Itchen Bridge is about 29m above chart datum (the lowest depth of water on the lowest tide), our mast we estimate with all its new electronics on top is about 24m above the waterline so with the today’s tide giving us around 3m of water that’s not much to play with.

As you cautiously motor towards the very centre of the bridge it appears as if there is absolutely no chance you will fit under, as you get closer it seems like you will definitely hit it, you quickly do the maths again. Yes,  we should have 2m clear above us.You know

from experience that the optical illusion of the angles means that you can’t see the gap, we have Andy on board who has done this a thousand times reassuring us but it still appears impossible that we will fit beneath, in the end you have to trust in the calculations and just, very slowly, go for it. Scarily, even as you pass under it, it still doesn’t appear that you will fit!

Relieved and once more in open water, the electronics guy (another Andy) started to calibrate the instruments, this mostly involved steering straight at buoys and performing large circles in the middle of the channel. What the passing ferries and other yachts thought we were up to I can’t imagine, but we got the job done and now have working radar, depth and wind gauges and log, the compass was not as successful and will need to be ‘swung’, by a specialist. The men aboard were heard to mutter that “the engine was sweet” which I assume meant all was good in that department as well.

Over lunch we discussed with Andy the pros and cons of batterned sails and with advice from the sail maker, the decision was taken to have the sail recut so it can be used without them. Down it came once more, then it was neatly flaked and off it went to the sail loft.

We opted not to take her out with just the Genoa and instead spent the next few hours doing some extremely useful boat handling exercises. I am fine at the helm until I start to get close to things, so a marina is not my favourite place to be at the wheel and trying to park Raya she suddenly seemed huge. It took a lot of instructions from Andy but I did manage a couple of simple parking manoeveres, sort of at the controls. Practice makes perfect and we need plenty of it!

Life is certainly different, I sit writing this in the marina laundrette. I’m not sure that I have ever used one before or certainly not in the last 40 years. We do have a washing machine onboard but it is about priority number 623 on our ‘to do’ list and yet to be tried. It is testament to how shell shocked I’m feeling that I’m gaining comfort from being shut, alone in this small room attending to our laundry.

A busy day of milestones passed, the weather has been great with the sun shinning and the wind light. This morning with the help of Andy and Chris from Stella Maris we bent on the staysail and genoa, both went on smoothly and for a few minutes as they bellowed in the gentle breeze we got a glimpse of how Raya was going to look at sea.

I collected the life rafts from their service and they were fixed in place either side of the stern and we organised to replace all our rusty old fire extinguishers.

We have, thankfully, had some warmth on the boat for the past few days by running the air conditioning on heat, thank you Chris Boulter. However, also today, the Webasto engineer arrived and the proper heating system is now functioning. On top of that, the shiny new stove, which was delivered a couple of days ago, is now ‘almost’ installed, enough anyway to knock up a bowl of pasta, our first meal cooked onboard.

To add to our already full day and complicate things, events in the real world continue, all needing our attention. We are both feeling slightly frazzled. So it was a bit of light relief, as I returned from my umpteenth errand, to find Andy and Rick, who when I left, were on deck sorting out a huge pile of lines, sitting at the table doing what looked on first glance like knitting. Thankfully it wasn’t that Rick had completely lost the plot, the needles were Fids and the yarn Dyneema line, Andy was helping him splice loops for the preventer lines on the boom.

We are now live aboards. Over the past couple of years we have read and thought so much about these mythical creatures that it doesn’t seem possible that we are now one of their number.

We had a difficult day yesterday, despite all the sorting, moving and packing that had gone before, finally emptying the house was a real challenge. All those bits inside and out that we had ignored, because we just didn’t know what to do with them, had to be faced up to.

Our final biggest problem was the rubbish, we had put as much as conceivably possible on the skip, Rick made an emergency run to the dump and our lovely neighbours who popped by to wish us farewell armed with tea and cake to help us through the day or Champagne to toast our new life, had all left with at least one black sack, but I still ended up with two bags in the back of the car.

We started at six in the morning, were organising and carrying at ten, cleaning by one, driving to Southampton at four and finally left the storage unit at eight. It was a cold night, we are still dependent on fan heaters to heat the boat and we woke with ice on the decks, but the sun was shinning and now this was our home.

We had shed a tear leaving Ongley, however as we sat drinking our morning tea on the deck of our beautiful yacht with the March sunshine gradually warming us, there was not a breath of wind. Our view, the rivers glassy surface, was only disturbed by the swans and rowers gliding by and the marine industry slowly coming to life. Had we made a mistake, of course not.

We smiled wryly at each other, thank goodness we hadn’t woken to the pouring rain.

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!

With Raya scheduled to go back into the water next week it’s all hands on deck to get everything near or below the waterline finished.

Rick and I grabbed the small weather window at the beginning of the week, of slightly warmer conditions, to paint the boot tops.

Slightly warmer is the key phrase, I was wearing a full set of thermals, a T shirt, a jumper and two fleeces, yet was still freezing by the end of each day. Fortunately it was just warm enough for the paint to dry, one more job done.

As the refit progresses, Raya is not looking (or smelling) her best. Rick and the guys at Stella Maris have spent the last few months working their way through her innards, servicing, repairing and replacing as they go. Panels and lockers are lifted, the seat cushion languish in the spare room at home, wiring and pipes dangle mid-connection and the air is a delightful mixture of engine oil and blocked heads. However it is all in a good cause and soon she will be looking beautiful and will be fully prepared to look after us as we set sail.

Rick spends as many days as possible in Southampton, working, watching and learning, while I visit less often holding the fort at home and trying to work through the process of disentangling ourselves from our land based life. We have started to pack up the house, despite the lack of progress with the sale, the paintings and bits of furniture going to friends and family are beginning to disappear and Ongley is starting to look very bare. The agreed completion date was three weeks ago and yet we are still waiting for exchange, however hard I protest and stamp my feet there is nothing we can do, the house buying/selling system in England is just completely bonkers!

I try to combat my frustration by telling myself that soon we will be sailing away from all of this. Of course I know that it’s not quite true, that each port will bring its own bureaucracy, that the paperwork involved in modern life will follow us relentlessly and yacht maintenance must become our friend, but at present I choose to dwell on thoughts of idyllic anchorages, dolphins dodging our bows and warm, clear, blue seas.