Nearly time to go!

So the focus of this week was to get Laurin ready to go. We still had plenty of stuff to find homes for, and we needed to investigate a noise we had heard when we had brought her back to Burnham from Fambridge after she had been launched this season. We also wanted to make a slow start to boat school, and we were all looking forward to seeing Patrick's brother John and his wife Theresa as they were coming to visit on Wednesday.

Stowing has taken us pretty much all week and finally we are pretty much there. There has been much fettling and reorganising in order to make use of every inch of space as 4 people living full time on a 10m boat is a little bit of a challenge. Still a little way to go until I will be happy but at least it feels like we have a home now not a floating shed. Bru finished our electrics and so now we have good lighting, much of it LED with more LED's to follow. He spent extra time pandering to my wishes to have light fittings that could either do warm white light for normal use, or red for night sailing.

The noise we had heard on our trip to Burnham seemed to be coming from around the prop shaft. This immediately filled me with dread as we had had a nightmare at the end of last year when the prop shaft started to work its way out of the engine. Luckily we were close to home and got a tow into Burnham where this was fixed with the addition of a grub screw to the normal friction fitting. I was concerned that something had gone wrong with this but on further inspection this seemed unlikely as the shaft didn't appear to have moved. We then started thinking about the disk rope cutter we had fit during the winter. We were marginal on the amount of space between the prop and the cutlass bearing and we started to worry that either the rope cutter was slipping, or that the shaft moved forwards slightly when we put the engine in gear and that caused the rope cutter to foul on the cutlass bearing. Having been out for a motor around and unable to replicate the issue we decided we needed to lift Laurin out of the water to have a look and hopefully find answers.

The lift was booked for Tuesday 12:30 so they could hold her in the slings over lunch so we could take our time investigating. Despite it being pretty windy the boatyard assured me they could still lift the boat so, as getting Laurin out of her berth is pretty tricky in anything over 15knots of wind, I took advantage of a lull in the wind Monday evening to move her round close to the hoist. Typically the weather was worse than forecast on Tuesday and they couldn't lift. Not only that but we were pinned against the pontoon at a horrible angle and life was pretty uncomfortable. Not much work got done that day. Finally she was lifted Wednesday morning and the children enjoyed watching the hoist at work while I hid my eyes as I hate to watch.

On inspection we could see that the rope cutter had not moved. There was also no evidence of the rope cutter having hit the cutlass bearing. What we did find was slight burrs on the sharp edge of the rope cutter indicating that more than likely we had picked up something hard (maybe wire) and the rope cutter had done its job. Not sure what the chances are of fitting a rope cutter and then picking something up on the very next trip!

John and Theresa duly arrived and we had a lovely couple of days where the kids overdosed on milkshake and we enjoyed a lovely meal at the Burnham Sailing Club where our friend Sharina of Taylor Made Treats was catering.

WW1 timeline with Dad

Boatschool has started slowly this week. Apparently children going from school to home education need a period of "deschooling" where there is no pressure on them to do school work in order to effectively transition from school education to home. It is suggested that this could take around one month for each year that the child has been in school. The kids had been out of school for 3 weeks at the beginning of this week so I decided to start slowly and see how it goes. We have started with Reading, French and Topic work and will leave formal Maths and English until we get into the French inland waterways (although I weave Maths and English into everyday life whenever I can.... on the way to the park "can you use 3 adjectives to describe what you see", "what about using alliteration?"). School happens as soon as we wake up when one child snuggles with each parent and enjoys reading together. After breakfast we have been doing French while Dad washes up so that he can learn too, and then we have fit in stuff about WW2 where possible. However I'm loving the flexibility of boatschool so on Thursday we ditched everything except reading and I downloaded kid friendly manifestos of the main political parties. Over the whole day we read through each and the kids asked questions about anything they didn't understand. It was a really interesting day where they asked questions about bedroom tax, tuition fees, and nationalisation. They also  identified that it is hard to compare policies on education when one party pledges to reduce class sizes and another states how much they will increase spending. Which is better?

Friday saw us at the sailing club for the final time. AJ and Esme went out on the Sport 14 which ran aground. Esmé was sensible and jumped onto volunteer where as AJ offered to help push the boat off the mud. The end result was the boat being towed back, and a bunch of kids crawling across the mud back to the pontoon. Great fun!

AJ in the lead, and being hosed down afterwards.

 Finally we ended the week with a curry at the kids request, in the company of Bru, Paul and Paula. All through the week the kids have been learning in so many ways and we've been starting to get into something of a rhythm of life afloat. Planned departure date is now Wednesday to allow for the seas to become a bit calmer after so many days of high winds.

Scrubbing the Dinghy