Blog Archive

Wednesday, 31 January 2024

Making things ship shape

Blog from Tim
We have been back on the water for 2 days now and all have been busy.  Sally and Heather seem to be trying to empty the local supermarkets of food and soft drinks, the provisions just keep on arriving but we will have to eat from shimshals stores for months to come. Simon and Tim have been working on the boat systems. The tender has been launched, to provide working space on deck, the petrol outboard motor, unused for several seasons and jelous of its electric replacement, has been revived and is now happy to feel useful again. Spares have been checked and stowed, space cleared and made available to fill with more food.
Generators have been tested and diesel tanks are been slowly filled with several trips to the pumps to fill the Jerry cans.
This season shimshal has some new instruments, a shiny new radar was fitted over christmas by the boat yard and now sits on a gimbaled bracket halfway up the mast, a new VHF radio aerial, wind speed and direction instruments now grace the mast head, all these new toys need cables which had to be fed down the length of the mast, an interesting job as the top of the mast is 75 feet in the air and the other end sits on the keel, right in the bottom of the bilges. The list of jobs remaining is still long but between us we have made a big dent and ticked off some of the harder Jobs.