Contracts are signed!
Well it’s all official now!
We’ve just got back from our solicitors. There’s no going back now, we’ve just signed the contracts for our house sale!
Our completion date is next Friday. Once we receive the call from the solicitor on Friday morning to say our funds have been transferred into our bank that’s it. We are of no fixed abode! Although we do have a temporary residing address for mail and stuff.
The boat transfer is scheduled for the 1st November so from that day onwards we will be the legal owners of our “Dream”.
So where will we stay in the meantime?
Earlier today we went and paid for our new van, so we are now the official owners of a Nov 2014 Vauxhall Movano 2.3 CDTI High roof LWB van which we will be converting into a full camper van hopefully within the next two weeks. Side windows are being fitted today so once we pick it up tomorrow we have a trip up to North Yorkshire to pick up the carpet liner. Then once we get back the work starts on insulating and lining it out. We’ll be doing a video series about the conversion. We will be staying in the van until completion and then driving it down to Crete so we will have a week or so camper van road trip to get down to the boat.
When we get to Crete the first thing will be to antifoul the boat and get her back in the water. We’ll then spend some time getting used to boat life. Because we won’t be doing much sailing over the winter we are planning on doing a road trip a road trip to explore Crete. The beauty of having the van with us is that the only extra cost will be fuel. We are going to be land and sea gypsies!
We’ve been waiting all year for this and now it seems to have come around all at once. We’ve still a fair few things to get rid of, pass on, sell etc but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
On a final note, the weather here at home is now starting to turn quite Autumnal rapidly. The drizzly days have started, along with colder evenings, i’ve now had to pack my flip flops as i’ve had to start wearing socks for the first time since March. We are also starting to lose the light around 6pm, the sign of season change, so it won’t be quite so hard to drive off towards sunnier climes! The first few weeks are going to be rally hard emotionally we think, because it will be the first time we will have left the family for any time other than the holidays, so it may be easier for everyone if we all just say we are on an extended holiday. It will only be a few weeks till we are back visiting anyway, although this will be the first Christmas ever we wont have spent it with family. We will make sure we have Skype set up before we leave for our parents and kids so we can at least keep in touch that way.
Oh, and one last thing, just realised, this Sundays “Sunday Sundowner chat” will be the last one from our house, so we may have to open a bottle of bubbly. The ones following will be from on the road and then the boat, so join us for that.
See you all on Sunday.
Carl & Jenny.
5 Gifts for the Sailor in your life
A question i’m asked three times a year, what would you like?
The three times are Christmas, Birthday and Fathers Day, and normally each time I say, “oh suprise me”.
What happens? I end up getting a shirt that’s too small, socks that are too big or something that will probably never get used. Oh and then there’s always the “safe” present, a pack of beer or a bottle of rum. Well you can’t go wrong with those last two can you?
As we get further towards the end of this year, the adverts have already started, the “C” word jumpers are already starting to make an appearance, in fact just the other day I saw an advert for the latest thing this year, again the “C” word skirt! I can’t see many men buying into that, but hey in today’s society, one never knows!
Well we all know what it’s like shopping for someone else don’t we? We want to get something nice, something different, but we really don’t have a clue. Well put that behind you, because if you know someone who is a sailor, (and the chances that you do are pretty high otherwise you wouldn’t have got this far already), then read on!
We have spent a few hours trolling the internet, to save you having to do it, for what could be an ideal gift for your sailor, or even yourself.
So lets start off
Here’s a list of 5 gifts everyone would love
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This is what an AWESOME Sailor Looks like SILVER Mug – A 14oz insulated stainless steel mug
2. Personalised Engraved Sailor Jerry & Coke Glass Mason Jar – Personalised Sailor Jerry & Coke Mason Jar
3. Headwear bandanas – Sahara Sailor 6 pack –
FUNCTION-Ideal used as a headband, cap, beanie, neck gaiter, wind or dust screen, balaclava, pirate-style cap, scarf or a helmet liner.
4. Password leather Sailors Notebook – Combination lock 112 page notebook
5. What Happens On The Boat, Stays On The Boat – wooden plaque for a bit of fun
So there you have it. No excuse now for not knowing what to buy the sailor in your life. A few suggestions we have found, something for everyone. Hope you like them.
And to make it even easier for you to order them, just click on one of the links below and it will take you direct to Amazon’s web site where you can place your order. A few clicks and you could have got your “C” word gifts before we leave October! Now there’s a plan.
15 Quick tips to prepare you for the sailing season!
Well this morning I was sitting in my makeshift office, well truth be told, on my couch looking out of the window of the lounge. As you know much of our house has now been emptied of what makes it a home as we get ready to move aboard our boat for a new chapter in our lives, so my office of 18 years has slowly been transformed into a storeroom as we have a daily routine of sorting what we’re keeping, whats getting sold and whats being given away. Anyway, back to the topic, so, I was sitting there thinking about how we could prepare ourselves for the sailing season, or more to the point, what tips we could pass on to you the reader on how to prepare yourself for the sailing season, it’s all about sharing. Well I started to do a bit of online research and found literally hundreds of pages from different sailors and sailing forums. I made notes, a lot of notes, put the kettle on, made myself a cuppa and then tried to put it together into some kind of order. So here it is, I hope you find it useful.
(small print – We do not accept any responsibility for you taking part in the following activities, unless you film it and it goes viral 🙂 )
1. Buy a case of beer. Any beer will do. Then place it next to a warm radiator for a few hours, invite a friend over, then drink it.
2. Apply low factor sunscreen to your face in streaks and sit in front of a sun lamp for 2 hours.
3. Sit on a park bench with large metal fixtures cutting into your legs, stare straight up into the sun for two hours, if there’s no sun look at the rain clouds until you get cramp.
4. Have a walk to the local pub and get very drunk, sleep on the floor for a few hours, then stand on a rocking chair for 6 hours. It is optional to sit on it every now and again.
5. Go to a cashpoint and withdraw £1000. -go into your local hardware store, pick up something for a couple of quid, put a sticker that says “marine grade” onto the item then hand over your £1000.
6. Sit in front of a large fan and have someone throw large buckets of salt water on you. Best if you cover the floor with polythene first if indoors!
7. Repeat number 6 in jeans and a sweatshirt and /or repeat number 6 with head turned sideways to ensure water lodging fully into ear drum. Continue until your lips turn blue.
8. Cut a branch off a nearby tree, tie ropes to it, stand on a rocking chair with tree limb and ropes – hold them over your head for 3 hours… at 5 minute intervals drop on your head.
9. Set your iphone alarm to 5-minute repeating counts … let it go off all day long.
10. Pour cold water in your lap and give yourself a wedgie, now alternate between sitting and running around bent over.
11. Tie ropes between 2 trees – push your body against them as hard as you can for 6 consecutive hours – don’t stop for pain or bruising.
12. Place sandpaper on your stairs, now wearing shorts, crawl up and down on your knees for several hours.
13. Make 12 sandwiches on white bread with bad meat and cram them into a bread bag – eat one a day for 12 consecutive days. Sitting on the bag between days
14. Tie ropes to rear tow ball of friend’s car, hold on tightly, but allow rope to slip through fingers as car drives away – TIP: works best with nylon fiber ropes, lengths in excess of 50′.
15. Upon completion of previous 14 tasks- sit down and drink 14 glasses of rum…. Well done!
So there you have it, a few quick tips to get you ready for the sailing season, or as it’s already getting towards the end of the season you could use these as reminders while you’re away from the boat over the winter. For you armchair sailors, try out the above, all the same fun but without the cost.
Have a great day everyone.
Fair Winds
Carl
Extra live chat – All about homebrew
Well during our regular Sunday Sundowner live chat show this evening it became apparent that we aren’t the only people who are a little more than interested in producing their own drinks, whether it be beer, wine or spirits.
We have been brewing our own supplies for some time now, so due to popular demand we are going to put in an extra live show this coming Tuesday on how we brew our home supplies. Some of this will be hypothetical speaking as the distilling side of brewing is not exactly legal in many parts of the world due to tax reasons mainly, so we will be giving advice/instructions on what we have researched 😉 Whether you go on to process your own spirits is entirely left with you, we can discuss the method but don’t condone doing it whilst you are on land!
We are sure you will find this informative and may even be the start of a new hobby for some of you. And if you already live on a boat, then it’s really a must as you will be saving lots of money making your own.
We will discuss the equipment you need, where you can get your equipment from and the process from start to finish in each of the different types of brewing process.
This is going to be a special interest topic and not just for sailors, so whether you are just into sailing or are live aboard sailors, you will find it of interest. Even if its just how to save a few pounds/dollars each month.
We hope you can join us for this extra live discussion.
Starts at 2100hrs Tuesday 10th October.
Carl & Jenny
Another quick update to the blog section of our site
Some of you may have already noticed but if you haven’t no worries. It’s only a minor adjustment that we are going to trial for a couple of weeks or so to see how it goes. That is…… we have re-enabled the comments section on our blog entries.
We were getting a ridiculous amount of spam comments, no I don’t want to speak to some semi clad foreign speaking young lady, well not on here anyway 😉 I dont need Viablue tablets to make my day last longer, not that i’m publicly admitting to, and I don’t need to know someone has left me a million quid now they’ve died and I just need to send you my bank details so you can very kindly send me my money 🙂 
We were getting so much that recently it blocked the website! So we’ve added some more spam filters so hopefully we may have stopped it for a bit! One of the things though is that when you make a comment, we will have to authorise it before it will be published. We try to look everyday but if it doesn’t get published straight away bear with us.
So who’s going to be the first to leave a comment then? I bet it will be Trudi from Slovenia lol! And before anyone comments…we love Slovenia and have been a few times 🙂
C&J
Please note the new time for our live chat tonight
Good morning shipmates,
We just wanted to let everyone know that tonights live chat will be starting at 1900hrs UK time instead of the usual 1800hrs.
Hopefully that will be a bit better suited to our friends abroad who are having to get up early to tune in. Now you get an extra hour in bed 🙂
Hope to see you all there later.
Have a great day.
Fair winds
Carl & Jenny.
https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlandJennySailingAdventures/live
Our friends SV Kejstral join us in the Ionian
Well a few months ago we spent a fabulous two weeks sailing in the Ionian on the Bavaria 41 with the charter company Sail Ionian. On wee k two of our trip Kevin and Dee, our friends from SV Kejstral sailed over to join us for the week.
You can see our adventures on our videos, but here’s part 1 of their series of the same week.
Hope you enjoy it, and if you do give them a thumbs up and subscribe to their channel.
Where has this year gone?
Can somebody just stop the world and let us step off just for a few weeks?
I know the old saying that the older you get the faster time goes, well according to that saying I think i must be getting on for a 160 years old! This year has just flown by. It only seems like last week I was retiring and now we are into October and Christmas adverts have started and people talking about Christmas dinners and decorations!
Well I refuse to be drawn into Christmas this early, we’ve still got some sailing to do when we get down to Crete! Speaking of which just a bit of an update on whats happening with the boat buying process.
Well, we found the boat, a Bavaria 47, which is currently in Crete. it is a beautiful boat (the one at the top of the page 🙂 We put our house up for sale, it went on the market at 4.30pm on the Friday and was sold by 12pm on Sunday. The searches and all the legal stuff is currently in the hands of the solicitors but we were told at the beginning of the week that we should expect to be completing within 3-4 weeks, so its now final sorting out of things and putting the personal possessions we won’t be taking with us on all of the selling websites and Facebook for sale pages. In fact tomorrow I have someone looking at a saxophone, someone else coming to buy one of my rifles, someone else coming to look at some biking gear and cameras and another coming to have a look at my last motorbike that has to go. Yesterday we sold our car which had just come up to the three year anniversary. We change it every three years so had it on a PCP plan, (similar to a lease but with the option to buy it at the end, hand it back or change it.) We took it to the company we got it from new and they actually offered to buy it from us for an amount more than what was owing on it so we used that money to buy a cheaper car which we will use for running around in for the next few weeks and then we will give it to our son who’s driving licence should be getting sent to him very soon, so he will have a nice first car, just as we did with our daughter when she started driving. We have been emptying the house of picture frames mirrors, fancy lights etc, well let me re-phrase that, Jen has been emptying the house!! Every time I walk into a different room something else has gone. I even noticed today that if you clap your hands together there’s now an echo in the lounge. On Sunday the 52 inch tv is going and we’ll be left with a 30 inch screen. I won’t even be able to see the picture from where I sit lol!
Well thats about it for now, we hope you like the new look we have given the website, and don’t forget we will be doing our live Sunday Sundowners starting at 6pm this coming Sunday. So until then, take care everyone and enjoy the weekend.
Fair winds,
Carl and Jenny.
We want You!!
Okay folks, we have a bit of a request. For those of you who watch our Youtube channel you will have seen on a couple of the later ones us two doing a bit of a jig to our theme music. What we would like to do to add some fun to the videos is to put small clips of our viewers doing the same jig on the titles at the end of each episode. SO if you’re up for it, just film a 15 sec clip of the jig on your phone or a camera, highest quality you can, and make sure if its on a phone its held in the landscape position. We will add the theme music so don’t worry about that. You can then send it us by email or Facebook messenger and then sit back and wait for the next episode. We’ve had a couple sent in already. They will be on the next episode:)
Here’s a link to a clip showing what we would like, or any variation of it. Scroll to 8.01minutes to view.
A prize for the best one (in our opinion).
Finally just an apology for not updating the blog page as much as we had intended. We now have several social media pages, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Whats app, Snap chat, You tube and Patreon, as well as our web site. We tend to update the other sites daily/weekly and the blog was getting missed. We’ll aim to keep it updated a bit more in future.
Have a great weekend and get those clips sent in.
Carl & Jenny x
At last, Dayskipper practical course in Greece
Well we’ve had this course booked for some time now and the day came around when it was time to set off on this latest adventure!.
At the time of booking the only airport open in Greece within driving distance was Athens, also the only flight company advertising flights to Athens was British Airways, which meant we had to fly from Heathrow. We decided to travel down the day before the flight and book in at the Raddisson Blu hotel, they allow you to leave the car there in their car park for your trip. It’s only a few quid more than their normal room rate so well worth it. We travelled down on Monday afternoon and settled ito the restaurant that evening for one of the best steaks we’ve ever had.
Next morning we got an Uber cab (first time we’ve used Uber, using the iPhone app). Really good, and good prices. Our cab arrived and dropped us right outside the departure lounge at terminal 5. As this was going to be our retirement treat holiday (or one of them anyway) we upgraded the flights to premium, so got fast track security, priority boarding and VIP lounge all included. What a difference it makes to a less stressful experience. 
We were soon landing in Athens, only a few months since we were here last, and as we have flown here a few times we are quite at home finding our way around the airport. We collected our bags and headed for the car hire booth. Within half an hour we were on the road. Sat nav set, showing a 5hr drive, eta 2100hrs. En route we called the sailing company to update them on our arrival time. Luckily a new motorway has been built which knocked off just over an hour so Neil & Di, the owners of Sail Ionian actually met us at the office. They very kindly allowed us to stay on the boat the night before our charter started so another thumbs up to their brilliant service. We stepped aboard our home for the next two weeks, a Bavaria 41′ yacht called “Off Piste”. Di had prepared a welcome pack for us consisting of loads of fruit, some tinned stuff, bread, oil, vinegar, salt & pepper and other bits and bobs and a very welcome bottle of wine and a few beers.
The following morning is what down to business, we were joined by our instructor for the next five days, Steve. It turns out that he used to live just a few miles down the road from us before he moved out to Greece 12 years ago. Small world. We soon became good friends and Steve’s calm knowledgable way of teaching was put to good use. By lunchtime of day 2 he told us we would be doing our night sail that evening!! I was nominated as Skipper for the night and so had to plan all the navigation which would take us over 5 hours sailing in the complete darkness with islands all around and the only instruments allowed was obviously the compass, nav tools, plotter and dividers and the trusty pencil. It was all down to preparation and being able to identify lights. Jen took the reponsibility for the pilotage planning once we arrived in the new harbour.
Well we set off, Jen wasn’t to happy with us sailing in the dark but I was quite confident in our abilities and my navigation. Along the way the wind picked up to a force 7, great sailing conditions, Steve kept trying to put doubt into my mind about my navigation as a bit of a tester but I stuck to my guns, didn’t flap, and it turned out to be spot on. We arrived at our harbour in the early hours, had a celebratory beer and hit the sack!
Over the next few days we learnt new skills and tweaked our already learnt ones to a fine tune. We visited some beautiful ports and anchorages and ate loads of chicken souvlaki’s, Greek salads and drank a few beers as well.
We got back to base on Sunday evening and was awarded our dayskipper practical certificates..a successful week and two very happy sailors/Captains!!
The following morning we set off out on our own……!!
Watch out for the next blog post about the next 9 days on our own.
Carl & Jenny x