Season 2016
02 May 2016
Well its been a busy and hectic winter with buying and selling a house and catching up with all our friends many of which had also been away sailing for the summer.
Finally we arrived at Moondance on 20th April unfortunately we are unable to sail this time as we had decided after a the problems we had with a very stiff rudder and it breaking our autopilot, to order a new rudder from the USA. All went smoothly with the ordering and the shipping until it got to Spain where because of and admin error by the Spanish office of UPS it was delayed by 3 weeks. Finally it was sorted out after 5 days of constant phoning and the rudder was delivered to the boat yard. Moondance was hauled out and we nervously checked the copper coat which we had done before we left England. We were pleasantly surprised there were only a couple of areas that needed re-coating so all in all not too much work needed to be done.
Jim organised with the yard to have help taking out the old rudder and putting in the new one. He was very pleased how easily taking out the old one was and putting in the new one. The yard engineer was excellent and within 4 hours the whole operation was completed.
As were not allowed to stay on board over night we went to a local hotel, unfortunately Jim fell ill with a sickness virus very similar to the one I had had a few weeks ago in UK but worse. Although really poorly we managed to get the rudder copper coated but we were unable to get many other jobs done so we will have to do them in a few days.
Once all the jobs completed it will be time to return home to England to finish the jobs off in our new house. We decided we would take a year's contract at the marina so when we will be back mid June when we are looking forward to sailing to Smir and Ceuta on the Moroccan coastline and maybe down to the the canaries and back.