Dream 0 Reality 1

I read a quote recently that said "the reality is rarely as good as the dream but always better than the office". We've been reminding ourselves of this quite a bit over the past few days. We arrived in Plymouth full of bonhomie and good spirits, ready to tackle a few pesky jobs and get sailing at last. We spent a few nights in a b&b and then decided to have our first night on the boat. Only one word springs to mind to describe the experience and that word is DAMP! It was hellishly damp - duvet, cushions, sheets, pyjamas, the lot. The following day, undeterred, we followed the advice of the boat yard sages to sand the hull to get it ready for a coat of antifouling paint (stuff you paint on the bottom of the boat to prevent weeds and barnacles from sticking to it). It was a drizzly and freezing cold evening and the messy, gruelling job took us the best part of four hours. afterwards, we were completely sodden, our hands were raw and blistered from the coarse sandpaper, our wedding rings were badly scratched and the lovely toxic blue paint was all over our clothes, faces and hair! No chance of a shower as the local marina was closed, so we dried off as best we could and turned on our trusty diesel boat heater ("heats the whole boat in 30 minutes!"). As it hadn't been turned on for ages, the exhaust was full of crap and poured smoke into the yard and into the boat! we let it run for a while, hoping the pipe would clear but 10 minutes later, the cabin was full of smoke so we turned it off and huddled outside til it cleared away. After this fiasco, thoroughly shattered, we settled in for night 2 on board...spent mostly shivering and putting on extra layers of clothes...at our lowest ebb, Tim said, "put me back in my cubicle!" We later found out that the temperature dropped to the lowest recorded for May in the past 15 years! Aaaanyway, we've managed to get ourselves pretty much ready to launch finally so the next update should be more upbeat! For now, here are some long overdue pix, of Waimangu when we arrived, me grinning stupidly at all the mess when we moved in, Tim looking like a na'avi from Avatar sanding the hull and the boat now with her new coat of paint.