A slight delay in this week’s entry due to my 55th birthday celebrations – thank you for all the well-wishes. The main ‘event’ was a trip to the Beaulieu Boat Jumble on Sunday followed by a superb meal in Hardy’s, Gosport, washed down with some fine bubbly, courtesy of Mark T, and Merlot. Anyway, prior to that, another busy week had occurred. I spent four entire days working on the plumbing for the rear heads, now finally completed after the grateful loan of a hot air gun from our neighbour Tim in the yard in order to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the 38mm plastic sanitation tube onto the fittings. So now the rear heads has a new toilet, new shower head and taps, and a re-engineered waste pump out system ready for the Mediterranean. All the pumps have been stripped down, cleaned and reassembled with new seals and rubber valves. When reassembling the seacocks in both the forward and rear heads, I noticed that stainless steel bolts had been used in a couple of places. This was a bit concerning as the fittings are phosphor bronze and therefore need bolts made from the same material. A quick search on Google saved the day and replacements were ordered. The bolts are 30mm long and came in at £14.40 each! Tracey has reached a milestone achievement by completing the removal of the old teak-faced ply cockpit seats. This was a massive job and took over a week to complete, working all day, every day and now ready for measuring up the new Flexi Teak replacement seating which should last as long as the boat with any luck. Tracey has also been polishing up the cockpit which is coming up nicely. Although looking a little weathered, we consider it as giving the boat some hard sailing credibility. We have had several complimentary comments from boatyard staff saying how great it is to see owners working on a boat that actually goes ‘real sailing’; sadly, many boats on the South Coast sit in marinas all summer with the occasional trip out, something we consider to be a terrible waste of a sailing boat as well as an incredible waste of hard-earned money! A number of other small jobs are getting chipped away; this morning for instance we had to remove the liferaft from boat pushpit rail, disassemble it from its mounting cage and get it to the boatyard office ready for collection for the all important service. This job took about two hours and involved us making a makeshift ‘crane’ with the rigging and winches as the liferaft weighs about 30kg and could not be removed from the pushpit whilst 3 metres above ground level, the boat remaining out of the water on stilts at present. Work has started now by Paul in the boatyard on the installation of our new bow thruster (at last!). Seeing two massive holes through the bow of the boat is a bit disconcerting but the benefits outweigh any real concerns luckily! ‘Barry the Rigger’ has also been today to survey for our replacement ‘running’ rigging – this consists of the rope parts of the rigging rather than the steel shrouds holding up the mast which were replaced back in 2007. This afternoon, I started working on installing the new navigation antenna cabling; after three hours of little progress in trying to pull four cables along a five metre run through cable cut outs smaller than the cable connectors would allow, I quit for the day and here I am typing the blog, drinking tea, preparing for tonight’s low of 2 DegC. Tracey is busy getting tonight’s fine dining together which is rice, chilli con carne and baked beans which is all we have left to eat; I guess shopping is on the cards for tomorrow morning....!