Day 1: Burnham to Ramsgate

Not promising blog updates every day but as we have free marina wifi here goes:

Early start unusually saw Esme getting up but AJ in bed. Passed the Royal Navy Boat berthed at Burnham and exchanged pleasantries with them then waved goodbye to Bru who had come to make sure we left! This done, Esme went back to bed. When she woke again she decided PJ's were the order of the day and she NEEDED Nana's blanket.

We made good time motoring, wind was on the nose and not strong enough to make sailing a viable prospect so we forged ahead to get into Ramsgate early before the tide changed, and to allow ourselves some rest before another early start tomorrow.

Once in Ramsgate we had lunch then headed for the beach. Kids had a great time and Patrick finally seemed to manage to relax... and he says he doesn't "do" lying on a beach!

Finally much to Patrick's disgust AJ remembered, just in time, the whole reason he wanted to come to Ramsgate.... Super Mario Kart!

Technical note from the shore support team! :)

AIS website tracking of vessels on the River Crouch is currently unreliable - the local shore base station does not appear to be working at present.

Laurin's track may not appear on MarineTraffic, ShipFinder etc. until they are in range of another shore station

(Their AIS has been tested today and is working)

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

Day 1 as a liveaboard family

Apologies for not posting recently. Things have been rather busy, getting out of the house, moving aboard and then driving up north to spend time with family and collect the kids who had been staying with Grandparents while we did the stressful move aboard. This was such a good idea as Pat and I were definitely not our usual laid back selves during this time and it was so much better that the kids didn't pick up on the stress.

So yesterday we travelled down from Leeds by train having said a teary goodbye to our northern family. Landy has been left up North with my brother who will sell it for us, so now we have no house and no car.... but we do have a floating home!

The lovely Hayley came to collect us from the station and drive us the short distance to Laurin which was very much appreciated as it was getting late and we had lots of bags. Laurin is still in chaos so this morning we spent some time stowing some of the bits and pieces before Nichola came to collect us for a day's dinghy sailing at the pond.

A wonderful day where AJ showed how much he has grown in confidence and Esme did some excellent sailing too. She was particularly worried about the capsize drill but in the end big brother AJ came to the rescue and went with her. In the end she absolutely loved it and wanted to do it again on her own. She had to be satisfied with a last swim at the pond but her little face shows how happy she was to have overcome her fear.

Back to Laurin and then cooked tea on board Pagan as we are still in chaos and Bru and Jane had called in at Burnham on their way back to Fambridge after their week's cruise. A lovely evening was had by all and AJ & E got a short guitar lesson!

Boatschool starts tomorrow with a slow ramp up. Reading, French and some WW1 & WW2 activities to start with. Full boatschool will start when we enter the French inland waterways.

Dutch friends to visit.

So with 2 weeks to go until the kids finish school and head up north for some quality time with family, and 3 weeks to go until we move out of the house and onto Laurin, we offered to host our Dutch friends! Well anybody who knows us already knows that we're pretty crazy so I guess this was no big surprise.

We had met Martijn, Monique, Dylan and Jazz in 2015 during our first trip to Holland. We had arrived at their home port, Goes, after sailing to The Netherlands via Ramsgate and Oostende. We had overnighted in Middleburg but found it not so great for kids so Goes was the first place we stopped for any period of time. Martijn and Monique were borrowing Martijn's dad's boat "Lynan"  and having spotted they had kids we quickly made friends. After a couple of days both families were ready to leave and so we said our goodbyes. The kids were devastated! When we arrived at our next destination AJ and Esme were still saying how much they missed Dylan and Jazz so we took them to the playground and bought them an ice cream to try to take their minds of it. Anyway 1/2 hour later who should turn up but Dylan and Jazz with their parents. They had been similarly upset about saying goodbye so we decided to spend the next week together.

The following year we had 2 lovely weeks sailing in company and again the kids were mortified to say goodbye, particularly as this time it would be at least 3 or 4 years before we would be back in The Netherlands. So we had no hesitation in offering them accommodation when we heard they were coming to the UK.

We spent the first 2 days of their visit squashed on Laurin, testing out our new berths in the cockpit.
It was a bit cosy but doable, which was all we expected. The kids went dinghy sailing at the sailing club Friday night, crabbing and rowing Saturday morning, and we went to the Parlour Café for cream scones and milkshakes at lunchtime. Down to the playground in the afternoon followed by English Fish and Chips for tea. Sunday was a more restful day but still plenty of rowing and crabbing, then back to our house for pulled pork sandwiches.



The next day we headed into London and, eager to do something a little different we decided to visit the Tower Bridge Exhibition. Spent a lovely hour or so there, walking across the high walkway with the glass floor, and visiting the old engine rooms. This was followed by a picnic lunch, river bus up the Thames to Westminster and then back to Tate Modern which the kids were pretty underwhelmed by. A short walk to the Southbank centre then Pizza and tube to North Greenwich for the cable car across the Thames before heading home. Tuesday the kids were at school and the Dutch contingent went out for the day before we said sad goodbyes on Wednesday morning.

So, time to start cracking on emptying the house!

It's all getting very very real.

So since my last post we have been very very busy. Laurin was put in the water and we were looking forward to taking the 3 cousins for a few days sailing.

The launch went well and the 5 kids in total worked hard to load supplies onto Laurin and help tidy her up. The next day we planned to take up the rest of the supplies and be joined by Patrick straight from work.

Unfortunately AJ had a bit of a cold and had a very restless night. As his breathing seemed a bit laboured I booked him in to see the doctor before spending a few days on board. Once at the doctors I was informed that he needed to go to hospital, and then that they were calling an ambulance for him.... and there was only space for me and not 4 additional kids! A few panicked phone calls later and my good friend Lizzy appeared at the Dr's and took the kids to her house until Patrick could get back from work to pick them up.

2 days later AJ was discharged and we tried to salvage what was left of the holiday. Moving the boat from Fambridge to Burnham we heard a strange noise from the prop shaft and promptly sailed the rest of the way, only using the engine to get into the marina. AJ did a fantastic job of using the VHF to inform the harbourmaster that we may have difficulties... proud mummy moment! Luckily my brother was on board so we could do some investigations while under way and established that the prop shaft was not slipping and the Morse seemed to be working ok. Our current thinking is that the rope cutter that we fitted may have slipped or perhaps the clearance may not have been enough... we were right on the limit. In any case further investigation is required and probably a lift out. Given that we now need to concentrate on moving out of the house, and that the cost of a lift out goes down in June, we have shelved that problem for now.

Nearly Splash Time......

..... though you wouldn't think by looking at the state of her that we will be living on Laurin in less than 2 months! 

Bru is still working hard on electrics and some carpentry as well as trying to find time and fair weather opportunity to clean Laurin's topsides. We've spent the past few weeks trying to complete the jobs that either must be done before launch (like changing the anode), or are easier to do in the yard next to Bru's container full of woodworking tools!


So the new chartplotter is in, our decision to go for the Raymarine es7 rather than a larger more expensive 9" screen meant that Bru has been able to fit it in our "dashboard" rather than having it on a removable mount which frees up space for an "on deck" chart table. Autopilot drive unit has been repaired and the autopilot is now linked up to our new chartplotter which seems way too "fancy" for Patrick. Next steps are wiring in all the new lights and usb sockets.



Bru has been busy making a table top for the sink between the kids bunk so that they have another "desk" for school work and play. He's also making us a bookshelf out of the now redundant speaker covers on the forward bulkhead. We've been busy making shelves for the hanging locker as these will allow us to make better use of the space available with the top shelf having straps to store and fasten down our printer which I think will be very useful for boatschool even if we can only use it when we have 240V power. We've also made inserts for some of the other lockers to help with organisation and storage.


Patrick has fitted 1 of 3 new vents to improve air flow through the boat. This first one vents into the kids cabin and handily fits over a hole left in the deck from the old hooter and deck light switch.

We've also bought one usb powered fan from ebay to have a look at. Seems quite useful as it charges from a USB socket but also has an internal battery so can be used independent of 12V power if we want it somewhere away from a power supply. It comes with  stand or a clip that we can use to clip it onto our bookshelves etc. Think we'll be buying a few more!



During this time we also attending a cruising association seminar on sailing in the Med which was held at cruising association house at Limehouse. Luckily our good friend Lisa lives aboard at Limehouse so looked after the kids leaving us free to concentrate on all the good information provided while the kids had a whale of a time. We were reminded of the need for a plank to act as a passerelle, as well as the need for adequate sun shade and fly screens. Luckily for us we had a fortuitous find next to a skip at the children's school. We spotted an old school bench that we thought might make a rather nice passerelle and a quick chat with the deputy head and it was ours. We did get a few funny looks though carrying it home through the park!

 Quickly tied it to the roof of the Land Rover before taking it up to the boat. Just need to decide now what length to cut it to.

So just one week to go until the school holidays. Kids will be up north for the first week so I can get on with clearing the house some more and then we will go get AJ, Esme and their 3 cousins to come down to Essex for a week, hopefully spending most of it afloat on Laurin. We've spent the past couple of weekends encouraging the kids to make piles of toys to go on the boat and take to Nana's for safekeeping.  The remainder will be sold or given away. Hopefully I can do some of this while they are up north.... car boot sale planned for next Sunday!

I also said a sad goodbye to my boss this week as I have completed my last teaching session and he is on holiday for the next couple of weeks before moving into a new role. I was surprised at how much this affected me given that this is a small sessional role that I have only been in since September really. On the plus side I am not resigning but taking a leave of absence so there is hopefully a route back in when we return.