36:49.05N 28:18.3E

15 October onwards

Getting the boat ready for winter means paddling around in the dingy full of fresh water to get the salt out of the ropes.  Mike would rather they were grapes of course but kept going nonetheless.  Amazing just how many ropes there are once you take them all off........

While hoping that the weather will improve so that they have some chance of drying......

It was also the time to have the inner forestay installed so that we could have an additional headsail.  You start with an on-site meeting in the front cabin to decide where to cut through the deck to secure the stainless steel chain plate that is needed to anchor the base of the new rigging wire to the boat.

The rigging is assembled on the dock and passed onto a neighbouring yacht so that it can be lined up ready to haul up and secure to the top of the mast.  The steel wire is over 45 ft long so quite a handful.

Once up it needs two very big spanners to tighten the bolts securing the bottom of the steel wire to the beautifully polished stainless chain plate now in place on the deck....

This is a big step forward in getting Tashi Delek ready to cross the Atlantic because it means that we can sail downwind (ie with the wind coming from behind us) with two sails at the front of the boat, one on each side, thereby making the best possible use of the wind.  The new sail to go on forestay will be made for us during the winter and will be strengthened to also act as a reefed storm sail.

That done we were ready to come out of the water and spend our last few days on the hard.  Once again we were called for late in the day and were hauled out as it was going dark.

But, as always, the lift team were amazingly helpful, even to the point of the truck driver setting off round the yard in the dark to find us a suitable ladder because he didn’t think the one we had found was quite long enough.

Every so often it stopped raining long enough for us to dry out the canvas, sails, ropes, washing and dingy so that we could store them inside without too much risk of mildew but we gave up on cleaning the deck when we saw just how quickly it was getting dirty again.  With everything stowed and everything fixed she will hopefully stay safe through the winter storms.   That’s it for another season.