By the second week of May we had purchased all the 'plumbing requirements' for the shipwright to do his thing. In addition the shaft had also been bought.

Only problem was that all this stuff had to be shipped and imported into Antigua. To make matters worse, the holding tank had to be manufactured in Belgium first - a good approx 8 weeks wait !

By the third week, the boat had been moved next to the shipwrights workshop and stores, making it a lot easier for them to work. Because of the heavy rain Antigua was experiencing, the external work could not proceed as planned. In the meantime, the internal cleaning, prepping and painting continued.

We are hoping that the external hull filling and painting will have started by the end of the month. The inside is progressing slowly and is starting to look good.

The gas tank position proved to be a tad more complicated than imagined...well, until we realized that the surveyor and us were not talking about the same thing, this after a week and a half of back and forth !

Basically the drawings which I was working off (and which showed the gas locker in a particular position), and reality, were not the same. Almost, as the actual locker was the one directly next to where I thought it was, but sufficiently different to screw up what I thought could happen and what actually could happen.

Once we realized what was going on - easy !

The 'upside' of all this back and forth was that it was discovered that some of the lockers under the cockpit seats had direct access to the engine room. In principle not a big deal except if the cockpit got flooded....so the suggestion was to adequately close these off so to overcome any possible down flooding...

In addition, while prepping the stern tube, the surveyor and shipwright became concerned with the state of it. We wait with HUGE anticipation on the outcome whether it is good enough or not.....

The one thing that has struck us, is that once the work has been completed, we will not have a pristine shiny new boat !
What we will have, is a structurally sound boat looking quite good, but there is going to be a hell of a lot of work that we will still have to do once she gets here !

And at the end of May, the bottom fell out of the currency !
Sexually explicit expletive !!
x many !!!
Thats all we need now : (

On the good side - the external work has started : )

For images see Favorites 'Restart'

We have decided that updates to the blog will be every approx 3 to 4 weeks from now on - we are no longer playing 'catchup' of historical stuff, and work progresses to slowly for a weekly update.....