Countdown

It's 9 weeks until Kevin finishes work and 9 weeks and 2 days until we arrive in La Rochelle to collect our boat!
I think that the To Do list is going well, but I'm sure there are things we've forgotten. We went to Mailspeed Marine at the weekend in Warrington and bought most of our safety kit for the delivery.

I had foolishly been looking forward to it and had done alot of price comparisons to decide on Mailspeed. The shop being only about 40 minutes from us we decided to go in person and save delivery which for flares, liferafts etc is considerable. The foolish part to my enthusiasm was to expect customer service to be anything but aggravating. I have spent my youth in hundreds of part time service jobs and feel qualified to say that good customer service is not that hard. Most customers do not expect grovelling merely politeness and attention, e.g. Not talking to your mate on the next till and conversely those customers who continue mobile conversations should also expect rudeness in return. Therefore, starting to serve us for a £1000 liferaft then wandering off despite being told we had a long list of other stuff to get, telling us that x is looking after us then ignoring us for 20 minutes when clearly no one is coming in order to spend time selling someone a 50p valve. The first person to respond to our requests being the Saturday boy who despite being pleasant is clueless. To stand and watch when the shop is now empty in groups of 2 or 3 chatting whilst we struggle on is fairly clearly not endearing behaviour especially as I am clearly most annoyed (hmm maybe this was the problem,too scarey face).
Then to gladly admit that all stock on several items is at the London Boat Show so we have to drive an 80 minute round trip to fetch them next week. Arrgh yes I know I should have shouted the shop down and demanded to see the manager and I can live without the emails of instructions on complaining. It's more the ruining of the experience I begrudge, this was our first big in person shopping trip to buy tangible kit for our new boat to take us round the world- it should have been fun. If I wanted hassle, stress and aggravation I'll go to work or get a train from Preston to Leeds during the floods, don't get of started again!

Anyway! The rest of the weekend went extremely well. Kevin managed to fit the cradle to the new liferaft and we managed another big garage clearance thanks to our fantastic ebay administer Alex. So now we are back to the stupid questions time of posting 2.5m ladders etc but I guess now I have said all that about customer service I better be nice!

There was a nice end to the weekend when we had a lovely comment on our last blog update from Gregor Tarjan, the author of the Catamaran book we had just bought. I think it only fair to finish reading it before writing the review, but suffice to say for now we are both fighting over it to read it from cover to cover. As scientist and engineer we have both been very pleased to finally explain the why as well as the what, with excellent explanations of the principles of Catamaran design and sailing.