Tom and Sus helped us offload huge amounts of kit during the last weekend in September, and have offered us space in their basement for everything from the boom to the cushions, the barbecue and the windvane.

SInce she came ashore I have been using every spare moment to get to grips with the refit, starting with mopping out the bilge with Pampers (wonderful nappies, they soak up iidirty water and old gunge with great abandon and efficiency). I discovered an old screwdriver down there in the black water totally covered in carbon, caked on to its stainless steel shaft, while it was grafted on to the copper strum-box of the manual bilge pump. Stray current is the verdict, so I'm going to try and track that down, together with the exhaust leak which must be responsible for the black water and sooty deposits in the bilge.

Meantime I turned my attention to the water tanks, as they have not been cleaned out since we got the boat, and we want them to be OK for our trip. The progress on this work can be found in the Refit album.

The photo is of Sam Brooke climbing up the rope ladder we gave him, on his Pilot Cutter Ezra, on a brilliant afternoon in late September.