Sunday 18 Feb the adventure begins as we finally unshackle from the relative luxuries of house and home, queen size bed & en suite, lazyboy & halogen reading lamp, home office & broadband, bbq & sundeck, swimming pool & peaceful garden....for life aboard a 16.00m long by 4.40m wide yacht.
The die was cast some years before when we jointly agreed three core things :
* doing a 360 by yacht is still the ultimate way to see and experience the world
* allow a minimum of 5 years for the circumnavigation
* do it before you lose the muscle and the head.
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| Pre-Departure 2007 |
Tonight we move aboard Musketelle at Westhaven Marina with the feeling that a 16 metre yacht has 2 metres for its crew and requires 14 metres for gear. B declares we have no chance of finding a home for everything ....and we still have more gear in the boatshed to come aboard. With cars disposed of we have a rental car for running around for those last minute things, more food, travel doctor for remaining jabs, (10 different innoculations each at last count), spare parts etc etc and the list goes on!!.
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| Musketelle at Westhaven Marina |
We spend the next 2 weeks living aboard tied up to the marina berth and time just flew by, impacted by the following major hiccups that were not on the radar :
1.Major sewage system blockage and health hazard overflow at the house. To cut a long and expensive story short the tenants have a newborn baby and "the nanny" was simply putting the dirty diapers down the toilet....impacting result predictable !!!.
2. As if this was not enough P went to the doc for a strained elbow ligament and the locum inadvertently prescribed Voltaren even when reminded of intolerance for Voltaren. The locum doc insisted a slow release doseage would be no problem.....wrong !!. A few days later P ended up in an ambulance going to Auckland Hospital bleeding internally. He literally ran out of gas and could not even ride our new form of transport...the boat bicylce without stopping after 50 metres, never mind sailing round the planet. B was silently very worried her skipper was failing before the start line.
