36:49.05N 28:18.32E

14 April 2010.  Packed, bags by the front door and time for a couple of hours sleep before the taxi at 4am. 

3.45 am, up, showered, dressed and feeling pretty chipper when text message arrives.  ‘Flight cancelled due to volcanic ash’.  As there had been no mention of same on the late night news Mike read on in order to find out which of his children had sent the wind up.  He doesn’t have a child called ‘Easyjet’ so it appeared that further investigation was required and you know the rest.  Like thousands of others we went nowhere for a week.  We could hardly complain, “Poor us we’re going to be a bit late getting to our yacht in the Mediterranean for the whole summer” so we left the bags where they were and made the most of our time. 

With careful planning (ie a lot of luck) we booked a flight for the first day the skies opened and got away.  This was a daytime flight so we arrived in the early hours, climbed the ladder onto Tashi Delek and found a bag with bread, butter, tea, hard boiled eggs, cheese, tomato and – yippee, a bottle of rosé.  At 1am, cold, with no electricity, no water and a boat full of everything that is normally on the outside ie sails, dingy, ropes and fenders we raise a glass to Bob, skipper of Wizard and a true friend.

We wake to inspect our luxury surroundings and find we are behind a toilet block on the only patch of gravel that is actually mud.  Really sticky mud that is kept that way by the dripping water point close by. 

On the one day it looked like drying out the marina decided it was getting a bit dusty generally and sent the fire truck round to hose everything down, especially Mike who was painting the hull at the time and was quickly ankle deep.  We are talking full size fire truck gushing full on from water cannon mounted above the cab.    Much cussing of the nautical kind ensued.

A somewhat more luxurious location was found for this speedy lady – ‘Quantum of Solace’.  The Quantum of Solace as used in the Bond film.  Well you couldn’t put that in the mud.

Anyway, back to work.  Not quite as much antifouling required this year but two coats of smelly gloop is still a bit of an effort and the inevitable consequences are quite a challenge to remove in the shower.  The antifouling clearly works though as neither of us have found any barnacles or seaweed growing in our hair for several weeks.

You will have noticed the state of the saloon when we arrived.  Not too surprising that it was full of sails, luggage and general debris.  Here it is again a week or so later.  Same saloon, different clutter.  And so it was almost every day as we worked on different parts of the boat.  Excellent ships discipline though in that we tidied up every night.  We had to to get to the galley and then eat sitting down.  No amount of planning or careful thought seems to overcome the need to simply get everything out.  We may think we have cracked it and only need to move two cushions and the pillows but there is always something else we need to get at to finish a job and that something else will require removal of a lot more stuff.

Thanks to the volcanic ash we only had seven days before launch so we were very busy, long days and hard work to get everything done in time.  We loved it of course; it was good to be back on Tashi Delek and great to be so active again.