Day minus 5: Relaunch of Purple Mist
Purple Mist
Skipper: Kate Cope
Tue 3 Jan 2023 23:41
We climbed aboard to set up the fenders and she was absolutely filthy with Sahara sand so first job after the relaunch was to spray down everything with water.
We then set about setting up the boat with the liferaft, halyards and charging up electrical items. The toughest job was the cable for the Sat phone aerial, we had cable duct ready moused but the new cable was just too thick to go through it so we had to remove and replace which meant undoing every cable tie on all the cables going to the aft locker. Claire and I took turns in sticking our heads upside into the lockers and contouring ourselves into small spaces to remove and reinstall the cable.
Final job was the aerial bracket that had screw fittings that were too long so had to be hacksawed shorter. We broke the hacksaw so will need to buy a new one. However a nice French man from our new neighbouring boat from St Malo lent a hand …and a hacksaw! He had been telling us how we should be doing things all day …”mansplaining “ which is when men assume women don’t know how to do anything. However after 8hrs of hard work we were happy he wanted to take over and saw off our oversized bolts.
Jeremy arrived and spotted another 6 jobs that needed to be done so they all added to the list for tomorrow.