Back in and the seasons started

Wednesday 29th March and I was carried across the hard and put back in to the water.  Skip, with a couple of marina staff took me round to the Southern basin and squeezed me in between an Ovi & a huge catamaran.  Check out marine traffic and you'll find me.

Skips been working hard on my white bits and actually this weekend a passer by asked if I was new !  That's the level of shine I have and skips not finished yet.  My laundered jib is back on and ready to go.

The level of shine Skip gets on my stern

My Shinny bow

This is me back on the water and the

starboard bright work polished too.

(which brought the comment about me being new)

This weekend in glorious sunshine, skip, his crew and two others turned up to sit it out in the cockpit with some champagne.  Mean while 50+ boats had set off for one of this seasons races. The Webasto heater is still not running properly on diesel but runs fine on paraffin, skips go this own thoughts on this but waits to see what the experts say, as he's decided to take it off and sit in on a bench and get it analysed and tuned to run to perfection, or that's what he hopes.  Mean while he's cut or enlarged holes to pass new 90mm insulated ducting to the master cabin.  There's areas under the heads in the main saloon which is impossible to pass new ducting through, so he's insulated as far as he can.  The fact that the saloon heads will have a short length of of un-insulated pipe work beneath doesn't perturb him as this will be the drying room in any case so that wet oileys can be hung up to drip dry and have hot air circulating.

Enlarged hole to take my new 90mm duct.

You can see the cables to the left to be avoided and the

old supports on the base where the cables ties held the old duct in place.

So the new Marlec wind generator is down below in the port side rear cabin. Skips working out where the read out panels are to go.  Bearing in mind the previous one burnt out, the new one is far more advanced and converts 230v down to 12v to charge the battery banks.  Allegedly its quieter too.

I've new shelves and bits so that more use is made of my space below.

I'm not sure how long I'm here for but already Easter is coming up and I'm expecting that following a successful shake down sail out in the Solent shortly, a trip to Cherbourg is on the cards for that weekend.  This is then followed by a sail to St Vaast for the first May bank holiday, with skippers friends in a mini regatta.  The JOG fleet happen to be racing to Cherbourg around the corner at the same time, so plenty of things to see.  This will be the first time we've been out for a night sail for a while and providing the crab pot buoys keep to themselves it should be a good weekend.  An 0800 BST start with a 2300 (BST) arrival on Friday and then a 2300 hrs departure on the Sunday for a mid afternoon arrival back home on Monday.  St Vaast has a lovely market.

I've two other boats to accompany me across,  Nimrod & Escalon, although the latter will be the first time across the Channel in a quarter ton boat, so it will be interesting to see how it copes with the conditions.

Skips repaired and replaced the VHF speaker at the rear, Raymarine wanting £90 to replace the unit, Amazon locating a similar inards for £3.00, so skips made it fit and expects it to pack up in 2 years time and bought another ready !

Here's to a new season in which I hope the works to Skippers house draws less attention than last year.