Shopping

Well another early morning start on the train and another blog update. Preparations are continuing a pace now. Most excitingly with a confirmed delivery date for the boat of 28th March! I have also managed over Christmas to book cheap flights to La Rochelle every weekend whilst Kev is there commissioning, de-snagging and hopefully conducting sea trials on our boat.

He will be joined by able assistant and daughter Alex during school easter half term for a week, before I fly out again for 2 weeks vacation to do the delivery trip.
The next few weeks then is the start of some fairly major spending. Starting this weekend with safety kit for fitting prior to the delivery. After quite alot of internet browsing it looks as though the nearest big chandlery Mailspeed Marine is the best bet for our shopping trip on Saturday. We will be buying liferaft (Seago ISO), radar reflectors, life buoys, flares etc.

We are also hoping to put in an order on the electronics this weekend too. We'd originally planned to have these fitted for us by a company in La Rochelle arranged by our broker. Primarily this was because we were originally both finishing in March and we wanted to get the boat useable as quickly as possible. Now with this great new boat deal we have, we get sufficient electronics for the delivery trip thrown in. Although these are Furuno and we wanted Raymarine, analysis of manuals on the internet suggests we can easily swap the displays later. Therefore we are now buying the electronics ourselves potentially from the States and Kevin will fit them later. We fitted the same model ourselves on our last boat, so this way we also know that it will be done to his exacting standards.

I think therefore, that by the end of the weekend we will be another step further forward.

We also got an excellent book yesterday on Cruising Catamarans by Gregor Tarjan, the latest edition, which has been a long time to be available, but first impressions are it was worth the wait and is packed with very detailed information with lots of technical detail but also lots of beautiful photos.