Moxie season 3
Moxie - Beck Family Adventure
Mike, Denise, Asia and Aranya Beck
Sat 5 May 2012 07:08
> 040.37.18N 000.36.10E
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> Well here we are, season 3 and in San Carles de La Rapita, Spain. Looking back at the original plan “2012 sees us through the Panama Canal, Galapagos Islands and down through the Pacific to Fiji for July 2012”, we are so far off plan now you’d think it was an IT project. When we left Gosport Asia was excited because ‘When we get to Australia I’ll be 10!’ and Aranya was very pleased that ‘When we get to Australia I’m getting a dog’. So, 2012 and we have made it all the way to Spain, actually the same country we landed at 5 days after crossing the Bay of Biscay from Gosport 2years ago. On the IT success’s list Asia reached age 10, there is of course no dog yet.
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> We spent most of last season in Mallorca and Ibiza, primarily we stayed there to get our utterly unreliable Fisher Panda generator fixed. After many visits from the engineers in tears of frustration I removed it myself, dropped it at the fuel pontoon and said take it away. They did and guess what, we had water ingress into the combustion chamber again. Now some of you will recognise this problem, yes it happened last year too. So 2000 or so Euro later we once again had a reconditioned generator, but a really reliable one now – it only took 2 or 3 attempts before she would start.
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> Now that we are back in the water do you think our Fischer Panda will start?, my arse it will. I recon we are in it for about 13,000 pounds now, we could almost pay Mel Gibsons bar bill with that much cash! The money siphon went.. purchase 2009, installation 2010, engineer 1 repair, engineer 2 rebuild 2010, engineer 3 repair, engineer 4 repair, engineer 5 rebuild 2011, engineer 6 bills coming soon. Actually I missed off engineer 4’s post rebuild repair. Fisher Panda is now our term for unreliable in it’s purest form, actually it means so much more than that (money eating, anger inducing, marriage trying, frustration giving, time wasting, MISTAKE!) If I were David Banner I’d be going through rather a lot of shirts. We’ll head back to Mallorca to get the guys to look at it again, I cannot cope with another season of generator problems, it simply ruins the experience for us. In fact if we continue having hassle then I will probably add another word combo to my list, Artificial Reef, 2 years old, 350 hours, one unhappy owner.
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> So we wintered the Moxie here in San Carles de La Rapita in the boat yard. After six months we are back in the water and just awaiting the weather to settle (it blows 25 knots and rains every day for a few hours, different direction every day) and for a few dozen things that we have ordered from Amazon. Amazon super saver delivery works all across Europe as long as the order is over 25 quid. We even have a washing machine now, very light weight but large and was delivered free. Fits nicely in the shower.
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> Couple more boat jobs to sort out, not the least of which is cleaning. During our last few days in the yard the wind was blowing very strongly from the wash down area towards our spot. The yard lifted a boat and washed down her hull, unfortunately most of the antifouling came off in the wash and blew all over Moxie. Everything turned blue, everything – even the kids scooters, even MY scooter. The yard guys came and washed everything down with copious amounts of soap and a pressure washer but we were still getting covered in the stuff so we had them come and do it again right after relaunching us. They were of course very apologetic but it really should never have happened. Antifoul is poison after all and covering our family home with this toxic substance is more serious than simply being cosmetically undesirable. Yesterday we polished the port side, starboard can wait for next weekend.
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> School has started much better than in previous years, lets hope it continues. Definitely the hardest part of this whole ideal for us is school, in every other cruising family blog you read school is never raised as an issue, in fact usually there’s wax lyrical about how good and easy it all is. Reality is a different dog, well for us it is anyway. This year the girls are in a Guides/Brownies Alone pack – so we’ll be incorporating badges into schoolwork, there’s some pretty cool stuff in there that we are looking forward to doing.
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> Today was to be my last day with Shell, however it seems I am not yet fit for full release into the community and my parole has been extended for 2 more months. Perhaps with good behaviour I’ll be fully released by July.
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> Yesterday there was a boat jumble here in the marina, I’ve found a 15hp Johnson and the owner is happy to swap for my 10 year newer Honda 5, trouble is the Johnson is a long shaft so we are going to see if the extension can be removed to convert it to a short one. Being a environmentally evil 2 stroke the Johnson is light, only 5 kg heavier than our Honda with an extra 10HP. By comparison the Honda 15 (4 stroke) would be 47kg and the Johnson is 32kg. Let’s hope it works out, if not we might just go with the long shaft one anyway – the Honda simply never gets used with our Johnson 4 proving almost as powerful and half the weight.
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> Apologies for the scatter gun repetitious blogging, my minds is all over the show.
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> We are in two minds for next steps, we need to be marina based for a bit for work reasons so we can stay here for 3 or 4 weeks or head to Palma, Palma is twice the price but it’s one of the most beautiful cities we have ever been to, living there for a month is very tempting.
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> Join us on facebook for the more regular one liner updates. SV Moxie on facebook.
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> Email us on yachtmoxie at gmail dot com, we’d love to hear from you.
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> Mike
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