37.06.38N 8.40.24W

 

Where to start..

 

OK well I am writing this because I am boat bound and can’t really do anything else.  Someone left the engine bay locker lid open the other day and then at night that someone walked straight into it and fell in with a very painful twisting of the knee onroute to the bottom.  Result is that Moxie is now skipper-less.  Yup, skipping is definitely out of the question.  The Skipper is more of a hopper at the moment, on crutches and knee brace for the next 2 or 3 weeks.  It smarts like crazy with the slightest bump and I have by now well perfected the art of wincing.  after a night’s sleep we decided that medical attention was prudent and after some trouble I managed to get off the boat but then I was stuck in open space.. So I had a ride in an ambulance with horns and lights flashing, saw the very nice Portimao hospital, tried out the xray machine and took a spin in a wheelchair, seemed a bit extreme but needs must.

 

We completed our move from Moxie to Moxie just in time but alas there is still a great deal of work to do finding suitable storage homes for all of our gear.  You’d think with having about three times the internal volume it would be a piece of cake finding space but balancing the boat needs to be taken to account.  Most of our storage space is forward, and mostly starboard.  Of course in a big sea being nose heavy is probably not such a good idea as it makes duck diving into the next wave a more probable outcome and ..oh well you’ve probably seen the Oracle AC72 pitch poling video.

 

 

Moving in chaos and farewell to our much loved Moxie 1, lifting her for the last time was surprisingly emotional.

 

So with me being not quite the boat monkey (so mostly only achieving to drink lots of tea), “we” have had to just pile everything where we can for the mean time which mean the starboard front cabin/workshop/laundry room.  We are pretty much all ready to go now though apart from getting the sails refitted and also our new full sized table tops which should happen early this week.  I hope that we can at least leave the yard by next week but that will depend on how much a manage to keep off my knee in the mean time.

 

Moxie is a big girl, 48 feet long and 24 feet wide with no pointy bit at the front.  Our layout gives us three cabins each with ensuite plus a workshop/laundry/single cabin.  The layout is almost perfect for us and is the best we have seen, but we still have three loos/ showers which is a stupid waste of space.  Thankfully we have the owners version of the boat or else there would be four bathrooms!  I can’t get my head around the standard charter –4 cabins 4 heads- layout for catamarans, surely 2 proper size non en suite heads is a better option?  Finding the right cat for us has taken an enormous amount of time and research (and a mad dash trip to Croatia last summer), every boat has something (or many things) we don’t like, in the end the Salina 48 was the best fit for us as a liveaboard family. 

 

Saloon and galley

 

Half! of the cockpit.  and Master cabin

 

Aranyas cabin, forward port and Asia’s cabin aft port.

 

Our list of upgrades has grown and grown but we might as well get everything right from day one.  So we have replaced the 1000w windless with a mega big 1700w one, had a beautiful sculpture (cost as much) made to display the Rocna 33 anchor on, 7kg washing machine installed, new full size table tops made, spinnaker furler, bruntons propellers, coppercoat, lots more solar panels, new batteries, LED lighting, wifi & navigation improvements...  lots of boat units (each a thousand pounds). 

 

Moxie came with a 37 inch telly.  I have this theory about telly size being that there is a direct inverse correlation between screen size and income/intelligence level, accordingly we have replaced the 37 with an LED 27 inch to make us richer and smarter.  The new telly also happens to fit better and have a much lower power consumption.  Having enough room in the saloon now to swing a horse we even invested in a Wii.

 

The girls have completed a whole term of A Beka school now and so have had a small term break but we are back into it now. 

 

Today the girls have a friend to play with, it’s the first kid friend aboard Moxie and very welcome as it has been months.  Lack of play friends is the hardest part about this gig for the kids. 

 

Double A’s playing wave chicken on Lagos beach.

 

Sam and the girls enjoying the trampoline.

 

 

Here I am giving a fellow cruiser a tow, his mighty ship is 1.7m long and the plan was for this crazy Frenchman to go to the Canary Islands (solo obviously).  Portuguese Maritime Police unfortunately had other views as the boat is unregistered and being so short cannot legally gain it.  So after 10 or so days afloat he loaded ‘the boat we nicknamed Epirb’ onto a lorry and headed off for plan B whatever that is.  This is our new alloy bottom rib and 18hp outboard – roll on summer!