“So how’s boat ownership? Hate the boatyard yet?”

17th May 2018 – Alcdaidesa Marina

The time we spend preparing in Alcaidesa Marina reminded us that every good thing requires a bit (or a lot) of sacrifice and a bit (or a lot) of suffering. We want to present the whole story, not just the pretty sunset shots. This is the story of that process. Even with many of the boatyard staff working on the yacht, we worked 70-80 hour weeks cleaning/prepping and checking over their work. The nature of boats is that the ocean is slowly destroying the yacht and you’re just trying to stay ahead of it. The authors of the Voyager’s Handbook, former McKinsey consultants without money issues, who have been circumnavigating for over a decade, built their second boat with no refrigeration and no running water. Their reason: less stuff to break. We went the other way and chose a boat with more conveniences than our apartments back in Stockholm. Nearly all of those items have had issues in one way or another. You put electronics in one of the most corrosive environments on earth and shake constantly and the result is predictable. I hope that when we’re the only yacht anchored off that uninhabited South Pacific island, all of those conveniences will be worth the pain of keeping them working properly.

A fellow boatowner friend asked us “So how’s boatownership? Hate the boatyard yet?” This just about sums up your relationship with the people working on your boat. We thought our situation was a bit difficult as the marina didn’t seem to be able to fix one item without breaking two more, but when we moan to other yacht owners, they laugh and shake their head, silently telling me “We’ve all been there.” So we’re probably not that special. In the end, we are probably partially at fault, applying the intensity of our former work lives to this pleasure pursuit. Normally when people prepare a boat for a trip around the world, it takes 4-12+ months and costs an extra 40-100% of the purchase cost of the boat. At the end of the day, we only spend 8 weeks in Alcaidesa preparing for our round the world trip, and it probably can’t be done faster than that. The 8th of May we had our one kilowatt solar panels installed and so we can now produce some eco-friendly energy .

The path to complete the solar arch was long and hard, and even involved personnel changes at the boatyard as a result of this project. But in the end we were happy with the result. The power generated with the solar panels can be monitored with an app, and you will find Scott staring at his phone and shouting out random numbers: “640 watts,” “550 watts”, “already 60% more than yesterday”. If you need to get in contact with Scott in the future, you might want to ask the app developers to build a message feature in the app.

We were also able to do some dolphin spotting in the marina. A little dolphin circulated around our bow for a full day. We were actually very worried for the poor dolphin since the water in the marina is sadly but expectedly not very clean, and does not seem like a place for dolphins to swim around. Luckily the dolphin was caught with a small net and released into the ocean the next day. We wish him good luck on his further journey! The last item on our “to-dos before leaving” list was getting the new 6 person liferaft and grab bag that we have ordered, and when it finally arrived the 16th of May, we were ready to set sail for our 1400 nautical mile maiden voyage to Greece.

All the best Scott & Mie

Want more updates? Follow us!