I’ve mentioned that “The Box” held some safety kit such as the New VHF radio which I started fitting today but will tell you more when it is completed, Lifejackets which I’ve put together today and shown Barry how they work and where we will store them for easy access but I’ve needed to buy some bits from the yard chandlery as we have a few things that aren’t really good enough to use for us to do 1500Nm so the Lifelines have been changed so we are confident enough to trust them when we are sea, the horseshoe lifebuoy light which we might have been able to fix has been replaced because we need to be one hundred percent sure it will work should we ever need to deploy it and the boat didn’t actually have a radar reflector which I deem as pretty bloody important; so today these have all been purchased and fitted with the relevant explanations in their use.

Maybe I should take this time to explain that for this 1500Nm trip that we are hoping to do none stop there will be two of us and Barry my crew has actually never been on a sailing boat bigger than a dinghy before. This said we do race dinghies in Cyprus and Barry is or has been in his life a real adventurer with real experience in the mountains including years of skiing and climbing in the alps and even a few expeditions to the Himalayas so he understands the needs and requirements for safety even if he doesn’t totally understand how they work on a boat but that’s why we spend quite a bit of time running through these things in a lot more depth than I normally would with someone that has done this before.

The other thing that was purchased today was some antifouling because although the bottom doesn’t look too bad, she is out of the water and so it is better to give her another coat now which also means that we can get the same stuff or as it turned out different but known to be compatible without the requirement or undercoating to key it onto the old stuff. Barry took on the hateful task of sanding down the bottom before adding one more coat to her which frustratingly needed a second tin at €120 each but at least it’s now done and shouldn’t be needed for a while!