Refit #9. Afloat Again

With the rapid increase in progress over the last ten days, we were able to see that our time at the yard was coming to an end, which was primarily exciting, but also a little unnerving as we had developed something close to a routine with the various different characters in the yard. With this in mind, it is probably worth a quick introduction to some of the MCI team, as they have been key sources of humour, wisdom and occasional frustration for us over the last two months.

The majority of my interactions have been with Sergije, and are typically centred around me chasing him on various items or projects that MCI have agreed to help us with. As such, I think he took a great pleasure in coming over to the boat early on Monday morning to ask me how it felt to be delayed – we had originally planned to be back in the water by the end of the previous week. Thankfully, I had completed my morning Calm meditation only 30 minutes before, and so I was able to swallow my immediate acidic response and recompose myself…”well seeing as you are here, why don’t talk through this fourteen-point list one more time – I think you may have seen it a couple of times before?”

In all seriousness, he was a massive help, over the last few weeks of the project especially, and organising the timings were causing us a bit of a headache. We had expected to move onto the boat a month before, but Laura sensibly pointed out that SF just wasn’t ready for us to live on her yet. Thankfully, we were able to book several extensions with our lovely Airbnb host, Romana, which saved us from having to move between flats; but, at the end of this week she had other guests arriving and therefore further extensions was no longer an option. We were becoming increasingly confident that the boat would be ready to both go back in the water and to live on by Friday, and so decided not to seek alternative accommodation even though this gave us a harder project deadline that would make the week a bit more stressful than we had hoped.

Standing between us and moving onto a refloated Serenity were a couple of big projects and a laundry list of smaller ones. The first big project was the renaming, which Laura had sensibly taken control of given my lack of patience / dexterity for lining things up. I think that Laura’s love of looking at fonts may have potentially blinded her to the other less fun parts of this job, as whilst designing and putting on a new name is a mostly low key and somewhat therapeutic task, the old names had to come off first! I wasn’t paying close enough attention to keep track of all the different tools and techniques that Laura went through to get these stubborn buggers off, but it was easily around 12 hours work and I’m pretty sure that elbow grease and grit (the mental kind?) were what finally won out.

Once this was done, getting the new names on was a walk in the park and they look fantastic. More importantly, this small change was a catalyst in changing our relationship with the boat. Before, the difficulty of many of the tasks and number flesh wounds that we had been incurring whilst working on her had made her feel like a bit of an adversary, or at least a stubborn elderly relative who was resistant to change. Finishing the name made her ‘officially’ ours – we could finally see her as the third member of our team, our ally and safe haven – and the remaining jobs we had to do were made much easier because of it.

The other big job was cleaning up the boat so that we could move back onto her (whilst also retaining our ability to work on her unfinished areas). Laura had arranged for the cushions to all be cleaned, which had also done us the favour of getting all these unwieldy items off the boat whilst we completed some of the messier jobs. Now they were back, and Laura had to take point on stuffing them back in due to my medical condition (highly debilitating fleece aversion). I gave encouragement from the sidelines, suggesting that her years of wrangling cattle on the farm had surely been good training for such a task – she replied that this hadn’t been a part of her upbringing, but given the speed in which she completed the task I think she might still be hiding something from me.

Once this was done, I was able to share my experience in cleaning yachts for Sunsail so that we could get SF ship shape for us to move in. Now the milestones were coming thick and fast. I have always taken an odd pleasure in packing up and moving home, especially in the process of unpacking and finding places for things in new homes. Packing was made much easier since I had never really unpacked in the flat, and we had trimmed our worldly possessions down in advance of the trip. Unpacking was a bit harder as many of the cupboards were still filled with odd lengths of hose and old propellers, but thankfully Serenity First is blessed with an above average volume of storage space. So, we took some time to envision living on her to inform where stuff should live, and this (as well as the fourth serving of pizza in five days) helped revive our spirits ahead of the last push.

The other notable accomplishments / frustrations for the week were as follows:

• Discovering that one old rusty piece of the anchor windlass was still in the space for the drum shaft and couldn’t be extracted with either a puller or copious WD40 and levers, which had me really stumped. I eventually turned to Ivan for help, who demonstrated that there is a time and a place for just hitting something with a hammer until it breaks (and that even pros drop things into the inaccessible space a.k.a. tool graveyard)
• Laura’s fourth excursion up the mast was made substantially easier by use of the newly installed anchor windlass – in fact, feedback suggests her ascent may have been “a bit too fast…”
• The propane system is the only area where MCI’s “have a go” mentality has essentially failed, and my complaints of a suspected leak based upon a clearly dropping manometer were falling on deaf ears. Luckily, we had a chance encounter with a man called Jose, who specialised in propane boat stoves and brought a cool gadget called a ‘sniffer’ to Serenity. Within two minutes he found and stopped the leak
• Laura had her first real encounter with the toilet systems as she had to change over a waste pipe from the toilet to allow us to use the boat’s holding tank and not just pump the toilet into the sea. It was a rare time when the task was substantially easier than expected, which was a massive relief for Laura (and for me as I had been preparing myself for a poo mayday situation)

All this meant that by the time Friday rolled around, we were on track for a change. By this point, the hiccups of nearly losing control of the boat as the yard team underestimated the windage / applying the final antifouling in such a rush that I would be finding blue on myself for at least another few days were just par for the course. It was a surreal moment as we collapsed in the saloon of our new home, too emotionally drained to really take in the significance of what we had achieved. Laura’s investment in some 6.5% local craft beer only served to accelerate the process of passing out, but we awoke the next day feeling much better for c. 11 hours sleep and able to appreciate how much more tangible our dream had become.

Whilst Laura tested our new device for making toast with fried eggs on a gas stove (best £7 investment yet), I weighed up the options for our next steps. We could remain on the jetty at MCI for as long as we liked, but our frustrations with the yard teams schizophrenic approach to work (promising ‘tomorrow’ every day for a week and then trying and failing to do it all at the last minute – I still don’t know if this stems from optimism or incompetence) had reached breaking point. We had an offer of a berth in a marina that was only 30 minutes away that our kind surveyor, Srecko, had arranged for us, and we decided that the mental benefits of getting away from the yard merited an immediate departure, despite a slightly ominous weather forecast. The journey itself ended up being fairly easy but we were even more grateful to Srecko when he met us on the jetty, as the 30 knot gusts made parking on the concrete pontoon trickier than I had hoped for given my familiarity with her handling characteristics.

Safely moored, we ventured out for a celebratory burger at Toto’s (now a new favourite), and then managed to negotiate our way back through the marina security for our second night aboard. The distance from MCI made all the difference to our ability to enjoy our new home, and despite a not insignificant list of outstanding jobs to complete before we set sail, the magic of living on a boat was now starting to seep into reality and put all our efforts into perspective.