How many of us have dreamed of selling up and going sailing? Paul and Lyn Hanby, and their two children, Sara (11) and Louise (nine), went on a flotilla holiday last summer as complete novices. They happily admit that they knew nothing about sailing. When asked to bring their chart to the first briefing meeting, they had no idea what a chart was, and turned up with the holiday brochure!
But they loved it so much that they decided to take their two children out of school, sell their house, buy a yacht they could live on, and spend the next year sailing the Greek islands. After a bit of thinking, they decided to buy a 45ft Jeanneau Sun Odyssey. They bought Corifee in Port St. Louis, near Marseille, but then needed to get her, their children and their remaining possessions to Corfu in order to start their year's adventure.
Sunday April 1st
Paul and Lyn decided to hire a delivery skipper to do an assisted passage (and a crash course in yacht management) with them. They emailed a number of skippers asking about sailing the yacht to Corfu, a journey of about 1,000 miles - and chose Yachtmovers.
So without a great deal of sleep, I arrived this morning on the 6.00am flight from Gatwick. Corifee had only been put back in the water the day before. It was raining hard, cold, and during the day the wind strength rose steadily to around 40 knots. Not an ideal start.
The children are still in the UK. At our first meeting I had had to tell Paul and Lyn - a difficult decision - that it would be unadvisable take the children on this particular assisted passage. Training two relatively inexperienced crew whilst delivering the yacht in waters that are fairly unpredictable in terms of wind and weather is enough of a challenge.
Until they knew more about sailing, having the children on board could be more than a liability for Paul and Lyn - it could be risky. So they are with friends, and will join Corifee when we get to Corfu. Meanwhile, they can keep in touch with us by using MSN.
The first task was to go through the yacht, looking at everything from a safety point of view. The RYA booklet Boat Safety has a useful checklist, and we made a shopping list of things that we needed to buy - including decent life jackets. Lyn struggled with terminology - a rope can be a line, a sheet or a halyard. Or just a rope!
|
| Lyn keeps in touch with the children by MSN |
Paul seems to have brought his entire workshop with him, along with two folding bikes, two scooters for the children, a flat screen TV, and a huge amount of miscellaneous kit which he spent a fair bit of the afternoon trying to fit into what used to be the forward sail locker, but is increasingly looking like a floating workshop.
After dinner ashore, we returned to test the instrument and navigation lights. The new port and starboard bow lights didn't work. Something else for the list tomorrow. At least it's stopped blowing so hard. The forecast is for unpredictable winds until midday Tuesday, which will probably be OK as we're unlikely to be ready to sail until then anyway.
Monday April 2nd
The anchor is finally back on board, thanks to a borrowed shopping trolley and a fair amount of muscle power. For at least a couple of hours, we were completely stumped by a lack of electrons flowing to the windlass, and the port and starboard navigation lights still refused to work.
Convinced there must be either an isolation switch or a duff fuse somewhere in the circuit, we searched the yacht. We finally located the breaker switch located next to the battery switches, labelled 'Guindeau', but were totally unable to find the problem with the port and starboard navigation lights.
Whether we will be ready to start the voyage tomorrow is an open question, but with all the essentials on board for daylight sailing, we can at least motor out from Port Napoleon across the bay to Fos-sur-Mer to get fuel.
For more information visit www.yachtmovers.co.uk
