Preparations

Before every sailing trip there’s a point where the excitement starts to outweigh the planning. We’d reached that point. The food needed buying, the boat needed prepping, the batteries needed charging and, as usual, there were a few last-minute jobs determined to keep things interesting.

Wednesday – Getting Ahead of Ourselves

For once, we were actually organised.

Rich was working in Portishead and I was off work, so after dropping off Rich at work in the morning, I headed down to Brixham with a full loaded car.

There were bags of clothes, dinghy rings, electronics, solar panels and enough miscellaneous boat paraphernalia to fill the car. The plan was simple. Get everything onboard and away so that when we arrived on Thursday evening we could actually relax and not stress about homing everything and checking our newly added features worked.

Of course, before any of that could happen there was the small matter of the food shop.

A pop into Sainsbury’s turned into a very long shop at Sainsbury’s.

Partly because it was busy, partly because this was an alien Sainsbury’s to me and the locations of everything made no sense to me. And mostly because I made the mistake of choosing one of the smaller half trolleys because my back was hurting.

That trolley was absolutely not designed for nine bottles of wine, 30 cans of beer, and enough food for two weeks.

Meanwhile, poor Rich was becoming increasingly concerned from afar.

The week before, the thermostat on the fridge had failed. We’d managed to keep things limping along using Home Assistant and a temporary sensor, but we’d ordered a replacement and getting it installed was my top priority as soon as I got onboard.

Rich was planning to configure it remotely during his lunch break and had been watching the boat systems all morning. When the car sat motionless in the Sainsbury’s car park (for over an hour 😬) he started wondering what on earth I was up to.

As soon as I reached the boat, the fridge thermometer sensor was Mission #1.

The night before, we made an agreement. As soon as I get there, shove the thermometer in the fridge and text Rich to start the configuration.

Turns out that as I’m hauling a trolley full of goods down the pontoon towards Cheeky Monkey he’d detected it over Bluetooth and connected it to Home Assistant. The sensor wasn’t even in the fridge before it was reporting data back to the boat.

Somehow, technology occasionally works in our favour.

With the important mission of the day complete, I spent the next couple of hours unloading, storing supplies and generally making sure that Thursday-night-us would thank Wednesday-afternoon-Gemma.

Then came the solar panels.

At the time, our shore power wasn’t working, so keeping the batteries topped up was important. We’d recently bought a pair of folding solar panels to replace our old boom-mounted panels. The old ones worked brilliantly but they were huge, awkward and usually required both of us to wrestle them into position.

The new ones were much, much neater.

And, as it turned out, surprisingly exciting. Who knew you could get excited about solar power?!

Rich has always been the solar nerd in this relationship, but somewhere along the way I appear to have become one too. There was an entirely disproportionate amount of satisfaction from plugging in a panel and immediately seeing the charging rate climb.

The original line we planned to use had disappeared somewhere into the depths of the boat, so upon a discovery of never seen before bungee cords, I fashioned these for the job instead.

I strapped the panel over the life raft, which isn’t exactly the intended setup, but since nobody was onboard and the boat wasn’t going anywhere, it seemed good enough 🤷‍♀️

As it turned out, it worked brilliantly 🙌

Just the one panel alone made such a noticeable difference, and by the end of the day the batteries were looking super healthy.

As I was headed home I bumped into our boat neighbour Robert, who was in the middle of fitting new windows on Frothy Coffee.

One side looked fantastic 👌 The other looked like someone had removed a window and forgotten to replace it.

When questioned, Robert insisted it was temporary air conditioning 😂 And given the heatwave we experienced that week, he may actually have had a point!

After a quick coffee and a matters of life catch-up, I headed back to Portishead to collect Rich from work.

Once we were home, the strangest thing about that evening was how relaxed it all felT. Normally for me the night before any trip is utter chaos and filled with last minute packing.

Instead, almost everything was already on the boat. There was no frantic packing, no last-minute shopping and no running around trying to remember what we’d forgotten.

We mostly just charged laptops, power banks and iPads and sat there feeling slightly confused by our own organisation.

Thursday – Southbound

Thursday felt so much more like the start of a holiday.

I had a few things planned during the day, including some pottery painting with friends on Clevedon, before heading back to Bristol for an appointment, before I had to drive 30 mins back in the same direction to collect Rich from work in Portishead.

With Rich successfully rescued from work, we left the car at Portishead Marina, grabbed a taxi to Nailsea and Backwell train station and began our voyage to Brixham.

Or at least we tried to…. Our train(s) were delayed, of course. Thank you British Public Transport.

Fortunately, the train before it was also delayed. So without much thought, we jumped on that one and hoped for the best.

We changed at Taunton, where Rich was busy monitoring train times and connections meanwhile I spotted somewhere that would serve Rich the much anticipated holiday beer🍻

Holiday mode on. A beer and a glass of wine on a railway platform somehow felt like the official start of the trip.

Eventually we continued on to Newton Abbot, then on to Paignton, where the usual taxi rank had disappeared behind roadworks.

Rich confidently headed off in completely the wrong direction towards a housing estate, before I pulled him back towards the shops where you’d be more likely to find an actual taxi.

We found the temporary taxi rank, met the loveliest driver and finally arrived in Brixham. Big sigh of relief

After weeks of planning, we were finally back aboard together.

Friday – Last Minute Jobs

Friday was one of those days where there was loads for me to do, but somehow no rush to do any of it.

Rich spent the day working remotely from the boat, wrapping up handovers before disappearing on holiday For 2 weeks.

Meanwhile, I was in charge of the practical last minute boat jobs.

The water tanks needed topping up, which led to the discovery that a quarter of a chlorine tablet is apparently still far too much chlorine tablet.

Yep, the tanks were definitely disinfected now. Whether the water tasted even remotely normal now was another matter entirely.

I also desperately needed to find a replacement baseball cap after mine had gone walkabouts over pirate weekend. Since becoming a full-time specs wearer, sailing without a cap has become pretty impractical. Rain and sea spray on my glasses is remarkably similar to driving through a storm without any windscreen wipers.

There was also Jerry cans that needed to be filled up with diesel, a job that took much longer than planned thanks to a missing fuel pontoon key. But hey, at least it was sunny while I waited alone on the fuel pontoon.

Next, and final boat job for the day… dock fenders. They needed to come off.

The first few came off without any trouble. Super easy in fact. And considering how bulky they are I’m still amazed that I didn’t drop a single one of them in sea.

The last two however, well they were quite a bit more stubborn.

At least 3 of the screws were completely stripped and eventually required mole grips and brute force. The fenders lost the battle, but not before the mole grips managed to leave m with a blood blister that hung around for the next week as an entertaining souvenir.

While all this was happening, Rich was done with work for they day and started investigating our ongoing shore power problem.

After dismantling beds, removing floor panels and crawling through various parts of the boat, he eventually traced the issue to the AC connections.

Nothing looked damaged, nothing looked burnt, nothing looked wrong.

He unplugged everything, plugged back in and suddenly everything just worked again.

Which is great... apart from we have no idea what actually caused it! A problem for future Gemma & Rich to handle.

By the evening, the jobs list was finally ticked off and we could actually start enjoying ourselves.

Our timing couldn’t have been better.

The Torbay Air Show was on, and we spent the evening stretched out on the bow with a glass of wine watching the displays overhead.

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the Red Arrows. With defeating those stubborn screws in a close second place.

Watching them roar across the bay and over the marina was a pretty special way to start the trip.

Afterwards we helped Robert move some his equipment back to his truck and attempted to load our dock fenders in as well. Despite the size of the truck, one stubborn fender refused to fit.

Thankfully Jamie from the marina came to the rescue and agreed to store it until it could be collected later.

We eventually returned to the boat, changed into comfortable clothes and prepared to finally sit down for the evening.

Then Robert messaged to say there were fireworks over Paignton.

So back out onto deck we went.

For ten minutes we watched fireworks lighting up the bay before finally calling it a night.

The boat was stocked, batteries were charged, and shore power was working again.

And at last, we were ready for the holiday to begin.