Standby for Cast Off!

Monday March 2nd 2020.

It’s been just over a year since our last blog entry and as we write this short pre-departure entry we are in the last stages of getting ready to leave on an unspecified voyage of discovery, curiosity and adventure.

New Year's Day at Two Peoples' Bay

Chris has been doing a major overhaul of Upstart all year including some much needed water and fuel tanks, new rigging, bottom scraping etc. [please ask if you would like more details of what we did and why.]

New 250 litre aluminium fuel tank

Diesel cleaning and delivery system

Settee repaired after installing the new fuel tank

Preparing to fit the new water tank under the forward bunk

Water tank going in - adding about 300 litres of fresh water to our supplies

Bunk all repaired, ready for a coat of varnish and then the new bedding.

Jenni has been busy on the sewing machines re-upholstering the whole boat in a lovely red fabric. We made a new ‘stack pack’ for our massive main sail,  several other sewing projects and not to mention all the triangular fitted sheets.

Sewing with the "tractor" portable industrial machine.

Learning about box corners

6 meter long mainsail stack pack under construction

Both of our houses have happy tenants in them and we have been living aboard for a month now at the sailing club. The cars are sold our possessions are in the garage or on the boat and we have started looking at the weather forecasts in detail.

Since we moved aboard the wind has been blowing hard from the east, almost continually and it looks like that will continue for the next 10 days at least. It is a good wind for us to get around Cape Leeuwin on the first leg of our voyage up the west coast, and we are looking at leaving at the end of the week.

Here are a few more pics of our labours this last year.

A few weeks on the hardstand doing hard labour including scraping off 10 years of old antifouling paint.

Blue is the new black

Back home at PRSC after haul-out, sporting our new blue mainsail stackpack

Believe it or not, this spaghetti is our new reverse osmosis water maker.

The old keel lifting cables - new ones were definitely needed!

Aerial sewing

New leather spreader boots

The new settee cushions and the lovely Sea Dragon painting from Ceduna