Stay Focussed!

Well, Nicky has handed in her notice at work so we are pretty committed now!  Feels great... but also 'kinda scary'.  Reading about other peoples experiences it is clear that getting everything ready to go seems to take longer than the 6 months most seem to allocate.  It was recognising that that led to my early departure from work to give us a full 12 months to prepare.  Nicky still has several months at work so for the time being we are still a bit inefficient with me working as a one man band.  I am focussing almost entirely on getting our house ready to sell so life seems to revolve around endless hours of painting and the smell of white spirit.  I keep telling myself that every brushstroke is a step closer to setting off.  Selling our house and buying another close to Nicky's parents is the really big event we have planned for this year.  That has all got to go well for us to be able to set off early 2013 as planned, so the priority order has got to be house first and BV preparation second.  'Stay focussed!' I keep telling myself.

It has not all been painting though.  Aside from finishing putting in an new upstairs bathroom I have managed to escape from home for a few days to go back to the classroom.  Three days of study and half a day of exams now means that I am qualified to work SSB and INMARSAT C  communications equipment.  We are not planning to fit an INMARSAT-C but getting the qualification was one extra multi-choice paper and a practical exam so I went for that as well as the SSB qualification that we are really after.  SSB Nets seem to be a really fun part of keeping in touch with what's going on (parties as well as Maritime Safety stuff).  The SSB radio and laptop will also allow us to send e-mails and position reports from mid ocean, plus receive a whole load of sources of weather synoptic charts and GRIB files.  Now I have the license to use an HF/SSB radio, another job for this year is to get really familiar with using the radio, and the laptop connected to it, to get the variety of weather information.  We can also check out that the radio and aerial fit works as well as it can do.  From all of my studying it is clear that interference can be a big problem as well as the grounding of the antenna.  Testing out the radio should give us an excuse to do a bit of sailing as well as other preparations for our sailing adventure.

It feels like there is still such a huge amount to do and the time seems to be disappearing quickly.  However, we have achieved quite a lot already and it should feel much more like we are preparing for sailing away when the house is on the market and we can switch our attention to preparing BV.  Finishing the re-rigging, fitting a track for a trysail, getting a trysail made and designing and installing a holding tank for the aft heads are the jobs that have migrated to the top of the list.  For the time being though... it's back to the painting!