GPS Position: 50:21.04N 003:34.36W - Kingswear Visitors Pontoon

This isn't a boat - it's a building site!

It's been tricky living on board as the boat is still being worked on. Imagine moving into your brand new home when the electricians are only part way through the installation. Seat cushions are still off, ceilings peeled back and different floor sections keep needing to be lifted so we've been playing musical boxes with all the stuff we haven't yet found a home for. The guys are fitting the VHF radio, radar, radar reflector, AIS transponder and feeding it all back to the laptop at the chart table which has software to mimic the cockpit chartplotter. On Thursday the coding inspector visited and Ryan and Chris have done a sterling job - there's just a small list of outstanding items, many of which we have but haven't had time to install yet, and we just need to email photos of everything in situ for the sign off.

We've had a few other problems from the major to the minor. The Studer unit (an invertor/load management system for the generator) wouldn't synchronise and the electricians traced the fault to a wiring problem. This had caused a relay to blow in the water-maker so we couldn't commission that until the generator circuit was fixed. It was all found and rectified fairly quickly but we were holding our breath hoping the Studer itself (v expensive) was ok, which it was. We wish we could say the same for the bow-thruster. It still isn't fixed and we're now waiting for a control unit to arrive from France. However, we got a Marinewise engineer to come along and retract the unit into the hull so at least we can sail away when we're ready whether it's fixed or not.

There's been plenty of little problems like the self-priming water pump not priming itself, wobbly floor panels, the chart table chair mechanism breaking - twice, there's a fitting missing for the liferaft, there was a hole in the cockpit floor allowing any water to shower the electrical junction box underneath, the door to our forepeak cabin is a different colour to the rest of the panels in the boat, and at one point not one of the three heads (toilets) on board was operational. Anyone who knows Chris knows how much he likes dancing - he was certainly dancing then!

It's impossible to eat on the boat in the evenings as it's a mass of tools and equipment and the table and seats are still stowed, so we make the most of the hospitality of Colin in The Ship Inn or Steve and Joe at The Royal Dart and occasionally venture across the river to Dartmouth.

As lovely as it is here, we just want to get going - it would be so nice to get south and some sun on our bones, but even if it's just along the coast it would feel as though the journey had finally started.