A week to go

Hazel and I are off work for a while, and set for a bit of an adventure. This will be our record of what we get up to, for us to look back on and for our friends and family to (we hope!) enjoy.

Last Friday I finished my handover in the Navy plans team and stopped being paid for a while. It has been an epic appointment and the last few weeks especially have been  extraordinary; I'm very lucky (and grateful) that notwithstanding events, the RN is sticking to the plan and I'm now away until August.  Genuinely sad to be leaving an amazing team, but also, honestly, very ready for a reset.  Stopping being paid having been in continuous work for the last quarter of a century is quite a shock to the system, I think I'm probably still adapting!  I'll be 're-joining' the RN in August to return to sea in the Autumn.

Hazel has finished her role at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, is now a fully qualified consultant (😎) and has started some initial preparatory work for her new role which starts in Salisbury in August.  This is mostly under control....and will continue be done in a few(?) hours per week remotely. My plan is to work out where there is no 4G signal.....

We are now both realising with a combination of excitement and panic that in a week today we will be setting sail into the Irish sea, Northbound.

Lots of preparation is done - the boat is in really sound shape now (well, will be until the next thing goes wrong), our admin is getting squared away, Hazel's motorbike is safely parked in my parent's garage (we are worried that my mother might be tempted to go for a spin) and at the weekend the car will go off on holiday for a few months.  Of course these is still a mountain of stuff to do - food, final checks on the boat, making sure the right stuff is onboard, working out what to bring (warm stuff) what to leave (erm.....) and some of the boring boat jobs that just go on and on. We have a final short check sail on Thursday, to make sure our new (to us) mainsail is all setup as we expect, and then done until we depart on the lunchtime tide on Monday.

I've been asked what the plan is a lot of times - and I'm a bit reluctant to tempt fate, but for what it is worth:  We have a series of hops planned between now and early April to include Milford Haven, Pwilli, hopefully Conwy, the Isle of Man, Strangford Loch, Arran, and then up to Rhu where I'll be dashing south briefly to scoop up Hektor and our first 'Crew' for the Easter around the islands.  From Rhu we plan to head down to the Crinian Canal and then base ourselves out of Oban for a while.

All of this is of course subject to the weather, broken bits of boat, or indeed, 'events' but a plan is a basis for change.....  After Oban, the plan is .... to have no plan.

For those who have not already been bored to tears by my banging on (and on) about Contour, she is an Endurance 40 Staysail Schooner built by the last owner, David, between 1977 and 1987.  This photo is her in 'all her glory' with all plain sail and our lovely reaching 'gollywobbler' between the main and foremast. She is ferro, teak, and iroko construction with aluminium spars and a very heavy construction.  None of the sails are self-furling, which Hazel and I both very much enjoy as we like deck-work and wrestling large bags of damp sails down hatches in the rain. She has a very ancient (recently rebuilt) Ford Sabre / Dorset diesel, sleeps 6, and in a decent breeze goes like a train.  Light winds are less spectacular, given that she weighs in at a stately 19 tonnes.  She is rock steady in a seaway, has a very open cockpit which is surprisingly sheltered, and all in all we think she is great.  When we decided 18 months ago to sell our beloved Black Dog and find a new and slightly larger boat, 'much less wood' and 'simple to sail' were both important characteristics..... leave you to judge how that went!

I'll try and post again once we have left, and there will be links (I hope) to this blog from our 'noforeignland' page which will automagically maintain a track on where we are, as long as we are in AIS range.  See https://www.noforeignland.com/boat/contour.

Planning to depart from Portishead next Monday....