Hardwork
Sarah Grace goes to sea
Chris Yerbury and Sophy White
Sun 13 Nov 2005 08:40
Hard at Work in Tenerife
12th November 2005
The last few days have been
a whirlwind of activity, as we have been doing boatwork. Sarah Grace
was hauled out of the water at the next door harbour, where we were going to
screw on a ground plate, onto the outside of the hull. Of course we also
discovered that the antifouling needed replacing, as well as various
anodes. So in a bout of frenzied activity, we acheived it all in a
day, coming out at 9am, and returning to the sea at six o'clock, just before
dusk.
Here is Chris getting ready
to paint the anti-fouling.
Here is the Sarah Grace
heading back to sea on the travel lift at dusk. After all the yard work,
the next few days were spent with Bill Sparey, as he fitted the SSB
radio. Everything was moved around the boat in great piles, and
there was nowhere to even sit down easily for a few days. Two new windows
have been fitted in the aft cabins to give move light and ventilation.
We have spent the last two
days rebuilding the boat....and she now looks very smart with all her new paint,
and back to normal inside.
It has been very windy and
cloudy and quite cool for the last week, so we have not been swimming. We
are all still settling down after our marvellous break in England. I
am trying to prepare the food supplies for around thirty days for five
people....I keep hearing of all these different ways of doing it, like putting
all the food for one week in a box, or making meal bags to be grabbed each day,
with a collection of tins in them. All the food has to be checked
for vermin, as there are rampant cockraoches here, running over the dock in
swarms. I am slightly bamboozled by the enormity of the task, and am
rather blindly filling lockers with masses of food in a rather haphazard
fashion. We will probably find that we have fifty tins of tuna and no
tomato ketchup......
So who is this fifth
person? The Stevemeister, as Freddy calls him, is a long time family
friend, and he is joining us next week to help us sail down to the Cape Verdes
and across the Atlantic to somewhere in the Carribbean. Chris and I
thought long and hard about whether we needed extra hands on deck, and finally
thought that it would be helpful and prudent to have an extra adult
onboard. This will help with reducing the watch load on us all, and
also mean that I will have more time to do cooking and schooling with the
girls.