Preparing our Boat to Cross the Atlantic | Ep. 51

Hey, welcome back! So we're back in Spain after our trip to Sweden and our focus from now on is basically getting the boat prepared to cross the Atlantic. We've got lots to do so we spend the next few days planning what jobs are critical, ordering parts, servicing gear and installing new equipment. We're measuring the stays because we're going to replace some of the stays. I'm going to get them ordered. So it's time to measure out the stays that we want to replace. A little bit nervous about it because if you get it wrong it's a real shame because they take a long time to make and they're really expensive and that wouldn't be great for our departure plans and bank account. But I just got off the phone with the rigging company asking them how I should measure it and it seems like I've got a little bit of leeway anyway because the turnbuckle gives you a little bit of space to get things a little bit wrong if you don't measure it up just right. So we're going to measure them in situ and just with a big long measuring tape. I'm going to get the mast and measure them and then we're going to get them ordered. I'll just rig it back. I'm really happy that the electric winch is working again because the last few times I've had to do this I've had to manually winch them off. These swages have pretty serious cracks in them so we want to get these replaced. So I'm going to measure from the top of the pin here down to where Alex is. Okay so on this one yeah? Back here? Okay. We've got this spare sail out that we were given by a friend who he had it given to him as well. So we're gonna we're gonna hoist it up and see how well it fits and then if it's all good then we'll be able to use that for a double headsail setup. It's got a longer foot on it. Yeah. And it's somewhere like that because then you can like at least start from that. Yeah. I think there's width for me when we're out there. Yeah. I just went and picked up the biggest package we've received to date. It's huge. These are the new water tanks. All our flexible ones eventually gave up and so we forked out and bought new rigid ones. We've only got 100 liters on the boat at the moment which just isn't enough in general and especially now when you're trying to cross an ocean. With this we should have I think 350 is what we said in total. So water tank saga continues. Fitting them was a whole other task in itself. In an ideal world we would have had custom tanks made for the space but that would have taken too long and cost too much money. We also made the decision to increase our solar capacity and got some better quality flexible panels to replace the cheap ones that broke last winter. We chose ones that could fit into the same mounts that we'd already sewn. Then you just want to have the things going to the middle maybe. So finally installing this through deck fitting. Decided to go for one of these goosenecks because you can pretty much put as many cables as you want through them. And the idea is that this piece basically is going to go like that on there. It stops any rain going down but it leaves plenty of room for for cables. And it will finally look finished instead of having like a hole just jammed with a bunch of butyl tape in there. So we've got three sources of power. This is all power generation stuff here. We've got the back solar panel 450 watts, we've got the wind generator, and we've got a new set of solar panels, flexible ones, on the bimini for 210 watts. So we should be good. But it gives a nice redundancy as well like in case one system goes down then we can still charge. That's a lot of cables huh? All our renewable power. We are up pretty late. Lars is just finishing up some jobs. Just starting to feel a bit of the pressure now of needing to blitz through these jobs. So we've got Lars just finishing this through hole with all the cables for the solar panel up here. The solar panels were up today and we got them fitted, ran all the cables, installed the new charge controller, ran new wiring down to the batteries, then installed that through deck, Sikaflexed it in, and now I'm just putting the netting back and clearing up. So if that all works that'll be a really good result. Just look how many tools it took to do just that job. That's a lot of tools. So one of the decisions that we made for leaving the med and continuing to sail is to upgrade our AIS. We've got an AIS receiver but we don't send, and it's just nice to know that other people can see you on the AIS. For those who don't know AIS is automatic identification system I think, or identification system, and it's basically a signal that you can send out from your boat and the other boats can receive. And they can know things like what direction you're going, how fast you're going, what kind of boat you are, and more importantly know where you are. What that does then automatically is basically help you figure out if you're going to hit each other. And more and more boats, commercial boats, seem to rely on that and not actually have people on watch all the time. And if we don't aren't actually sending then we're relying on either somebody actually seeing our lights from the bridge or radar which those should be fine and generally are fine. But AIS gives you that like peace of mind that people can see you. Yeah it is a bit worrying at night sometimes you're like, oh I haven't seen them. Many times we're on the radio saying like, hey have you seen us? And then yep they've seen us so it's fine. So we decided to go for it and upgrade to a transponder which now sends and pings our information out into the world. Time to leave Estepona. It's been a busy morning. I mean practically finishing up some jobs. We've got most done. Water tanks are done. Solar panels are in. We've rearranged the entire boat which is like painful. And now finally leaving Estepona. Yeah I know. That one. But what about, he means the ones over there doesn't he? But I mean like it's not connected to a big fishing line. It's just floating. It's just air. Yeah I know. So we just got to the coast and this guy, like the Guardia Civil, just stopped us and asked us if we'd seen these jerrycans out here because they're worried about drugs around here. And this is just fishing stuff I think. But yeah we just checked and there's nothing. They're obviously floating so they're empty. You want to see if they were full. I think to us we knew that that was fishing stuff right? We see that stuff out there all the time. No but obviously it would be a good cover up. You know you can't check every single fishing port in the Med and not say that that's, they've got drugs in them. True. Those things are empty but what they could have done is sunk a bunch of stuff to the ground and then float on and it's clearly attached to a net so. But I mean then we come back into shore after running the policeman's errand of going and checking and he's like, by the way you can't keep the dinghy here. Probably have to go somewhere else. No man. I'm gonna keep it here. So we just woke up and it feels like it's really early but it's like eight o'clock but the sun gets up so late now. So we've just been getting up once it's light. It's just getting a little bit colder now. Just had to dig out my fleeces and jumpers and get cozy because it is not warm in the mornings anymore. We are just anchored outside La Duquesa. We're about 15 miles, 15-20 miles away from Gibraltar and we're gonna head down there today. The final leg of the Mediterranean chapter. Wow. It's cold. Oh, ça va. Refreshed and clean. It's been a while. We ran out of hot water a while ago so we've had to brace ourselves for a cold shower for a while. It still is a lake out here but also we're not going very far so it's really calm. You appreciate mornings like this because it can get a little bit wild around here. It feels pretty good to be out here. It's just the same with Lars. It's gonna be the furthest west that we've been so far with the boat. This is exactly where we turned back last year, La Duquesa. So we're officially, Navica's officially been the most furthest west since we've been her owners in the past two years which is really exciting because last year we didn't really sail to new places but we sailed around the same waters that we'd sailed the year before so it's just really exciting to be able to sail somewhere new. It just makes me realise how long it's been since we've had that feeling. Just, you know, we don't really know where we're going and we haven't been there before with the boat. It's just all so new and that sense of novelty and adventure is coming back so the excitement does too. We can just see down Gibraltar Strait. So you have Europe on this side and Africa on that side. We came around the rock towards Gibraltar and we anchored off the Spanish side of the rock just off the town of La Lina which is walking distance away from Gibraltar itself. So we made it to La Lina and we were wondering about going to land today but in the end we've decided we're gonna get on with some boat jobs and do the big one here which is replacing two of our stays. So we ordered the stays off Jimmy Green and got them shipped down from the UK which isn't great post Brexit because you have to pay a little bit more for customs and things, duties, but anyway still worked out cheaper and easier and good quality at least. And so we are going to replace them now. I can't get this on. Like it's not the same thread. So I mean we shouldn't be surprised really there's always something but it turns out our boat is unique in that the stays are threaded in the opposite way to what is convention at least here and now. And I should have checked really but because you could only order the studs in a certain in the right hand thread I just assumed that that's how it's done and then obviously come to put it in and it's the wrong way around. So okay what it means is we need to replace the bottom half to the toggles and the turnbuckle which is an extra 100 pounds per stay. But they have some in a tandoori here in Gibraltar so we're probably gonna go pick them up here. Yeah there's always something. Just a minor setback and a mistake that only cost 200 pounds is we should maybe just consider ourselves lucky. When you're getting new stays done double check what direction these threads are. We just made that mistake. Usually the convention is that going from the top they should thread in to the right like the normal way you would expect righty-tighty and then from the bottom it's to the left. For some reason on our boat it's the opposite way around which we just found out the hard way. Should have checked but that's fine we were gonna keep we were gonna keep the turnbuckle piece because it seems fine but um and just replace the stay but now we'll just replace the whole thing which is probably for the best anyway. We walked across the border to Gibraltar and it felt really strange to change countries so quickly it genuinely felt like being back in the UK but in the sun. We just went to the Morrisons here and picked up some goodies but we've just gone a bit wild with all the things we can't get like just like snacks and chutneys what else did we get? Sweets and teas and biscuits and yeah all sorts of stuff so all good stuff for the upcoming passage. Yeah I think like a little wine gum little treats as we go it's gonna be great. Good afternoon so this morning we were on anchor and all of a sudden we uh heard this like horn right next to the boat and someone trying to get our attention so we came up and that was the Guardia Civil which is like the local police here who came up to us to tell us that we couldn't anchor where we were so they went around all the boats in the anchorage and asked them to to all move and uh we've heard that this happens we're a bit bummed that it happened to us but but there you go so we're in the marina now um which isn't too bad we've got a nice spot here nice view on the rock and yeah a little bit more space it means we can actually do boat jobs a bit more easily as well so it's not the worst thing in the world and we were going to come into the marina in a few days time anyway so yeah. It's pretty narrow though so I better not fall in. We headed into the center of La Linea to check out the market and pick up some more supplies. We were pleasantly surprised by La Linea after having heard quite a lot about its border town drug smuggling reputation. We're heading back to the boat down this way. Oh yeah. Put a little bit of grease on there. This is gonna look way better. One big job down but plenty more to go. We also installed new plumbing for the bilge pump and put another coat of epoxy on the countertop in a lighter white this time which we're really happy with. Wow it's so much lighter than the other one isn't it? So what do you got here? The most indulgent treat, medjool date. We picked these up at the market made a really good deal because they're really expensive usually. You just pop a little almond inside the medjool date and then enjoy. Well the coffee, so good. We also made the most of some down time to do a deep clean of the boat as well. There are a thousand different spaces beneath and behind cupboards and drawers that really needed a deep clean. One of the more fun jobs to do was dropping off our life raft to be serviced. It was amazing to see all the other life rafts there that were being serviced as well. It's quite funny isn't it? Yeah we've just come to drop the life raft off to get it serviced and it looks like we've come to the right place. I'd say. The one at the back and it's used on cruise ships and they usually deploy it in floors so there's four of them at a time and just people coming down this chute from these huge cruise ships. It's kind of weird. It's crazy. That was so much more than compared to the other ones. We enjoyed some time with friends and family who were in Gibraltar for the week. We went to this great restaurant overlooking the Gibraltar Strait and were able to get a feel for what our exit out of the Mediterranean would look like in a few days time. Thanks for watching. Join us next time as we finally leave the Mediterranean and head out to the Atlantic.