Our final three weeks before departure

It’s exactly three weeks until we turn the key on our house and take off to the Southern Hemisphere.  With any luck, by then, we will have some tenants lined up to open the door once again, move their belongings into the empty rooms, fill the air with chatter and laughter, and even more importantly, pay the bills for us while we are away.  

Hopefully we won't need this many clothes in the southern hemisphere!

It turns out - like many things in life - that renting out a house is not quite as straightforward as we had been led to believe.  We were floating along on a cloud of heady optimism, egged on by the estate agents, thinking that we would have the rental tied up after a single January Saturday of back-to-back “Open House” style viewings.  The “families moving from London”, we were told, would be fighting one another to secure this prime location near to the station.  The terraced-house middle-class clichés – a  side-return and a loft-conversion - would be impossible to resist.  But now the rental market, apparently, is not as buoyant as usual, there are lots of other rental properties out there, and not as many families looking for houses as we had hoped.  We still have a few weeks to go, and have faith that all will work out.  Meanwhile, if you know anyone looking for a great family house in Winchester, do please put them in touch!

It's a lovely family house, but no tenants yet..!

As D-day draws near, we are sensing that those around us are not entirely comfortable with the concept of this trip.  Eloise recently gave a presentation to her class, showing them pictures of the boat and our route, for which she was awarded “Citizen of the Week”.  But the award was not for an informative and well-delivered presentation; no, it was for “taking extra care to answer questions about her upcoming adventure, and to reassure her friends.”  Her teacher told me she was asked about if the boat could tip over, and whether we might get eaten by sharks, amongst other worries.  Apparently, she was very calm and measured, explaining that the boat won’t tip over because it has a well-attached keel, and we won’t swim in open water, where the sharks live.  Fingers crossed she is right about both of those!

Eloise also received an amazing “bon voyage” package from her Godmother, Alicia.  As well as travel games and activities, there was a St Christopher keyring.  I explained to the children that St Christopher is the Patron Saint of travel, and he will keep us safe while we are away. (I realised I didn’t know anything more than that about St Christopher, so researched a little on Wikipedia; see footnote if you are interested.)  A few days later, on my 40^th birthday, another St Christopher arrived in our lives – a beautifully engraved necklace from my sister, Serena.  The message on the back was about kind winds and safe harbours, and this reminded me once again that people at home will be wondering, and sometimes worrying, about how we are getting on at sea, as they tuck themselves into their dry, flat beds back at home. 

A happy Jack after a good night's sleep in his dry, flat bed..
.. soon afterwards, he announced that he is "not coming" on Victoria with us!

Everyone is telling us to be careful, asking if the children will wear lifejackets all the time, whether we will clip them on, and if they can all swim; safety is our followers’ most serious concern.  One of our elderly neighbours summed this up for me.  He stopped in the street to chat, whilst I was frantically hoovering an unimaginable volume of biscuit crumbs, detached pom-bear limbs and small bits of mud from the depths of our freshly washed car, so that I could take some decent photos of it (for sales purposes).  He glanced from my car-cleaning frenzy to the “to let” sign poking out of our hedge, then asked me when we were leaving, and if we would be going round Cape Horn.  When I told him we had no plans to, he breathed a visible sigh of relief.  “I’m so glad to hear that,” he said, “In that case hopefully you’ll make it back, and we’ll see you again when you return…!”

our unusually shiny 7-seater S-max, available from February 28th..

Given the general level of anxiety, I want to reassure you that Angus and I have sailed together for fourteen years, eight of those with children, and we have well-established safety procedures in place.  The two of us met doing the the Clipper Round the World Race in 2005.  For anyone unfamiliar with Clipper, their business model is to recruit “normal” people, mostly non-sailors, through adverts on the London Underground, tempt them from their monthly incomes and comfortable beds, pluck them from their safe houses, and drop them on to the decks of 70-foot racing yachts.  It will come as no surprise, then, to hear that Clipper is big on safety.  Safety on a boat is the same as in the rest of life.  Prepare, plan, practice, know everyone’s limitations and have a plan for emergency situations.  We reduce sail as soon as there’s a sniff of the wind increasing, and try to avoid making stupid mistakes by thinking things through first!  Prevention is better than cure..

In terms of lifejackets – yes, we all have them, and yes, we will all wear them.  When it is windy, rough, dark, if we are alone on deck, or are leaving the cockpit, Angus and I will always clip ourselves to the boat.  The children clip on as they come up on deck, and if it is very windy or rough, we generally keep them down below anyway.  When we are moored or anchored, they wear lifejackets but do not clip on, unless it is very rolly or there is a strong tide.  Eloise is a great swimmer now, and George is not far behind her, so our rules in calm, clear, warm anchorages will no doubt evolve as time progresses.    

In addition to our lifejackets, Angus and I have bought ourselves personal Man Over Board (MOB) AIS transponders.  These amazing little bits of kit zip into a lifejacket, and in the case of a MOB, they transmit a signal (indicating MOB position) to the boat’s navigation system, and to all other boats in the area.  (We haven’t bought these for the children; the devices are expensive, the children won’t be on deck without one of us, and if one of the children did manage to fall in, Angus or I would have to jump in too…).  These kind of worst-case-scenarios don’t really bear thinking about, but we have forced ourselves to consider them as part of our preparation.  I hope this is reassuring in terms of our safety at sea.

At 18cm high, with a 7 year battery life, this is an amazing bit of safety kit!

From our perspective, we are still a very long way from going to sea.  Somehow, we first have to distil our belongings down to five 23kg suitcases, pack away (or give away) the contents of our house, try and get a grip of all our correspondence, banking, communications etc, rent out the house, sell the car, finalise our boat insurance, travel insurance.. and so the list goes on!  The whole challenge has seemed daunting at times over the past few weeks, especially with my 40th birthday and a horrible flu bug squeezed in, but with the amazing support and enthusiasm of all our friends and family, plus some long-awaited sunshine and blue sky today, I think we are up to the task.  I haven’t even really begun to think about how to stock the boat with six months’ worth of staple food supplies, but the great news is that Eloise’s school teacher has said she needs to practice lots of multiplication.  Just how risky would it be to leave the quantities of loo roll, rice, pasta, milk powder and tinned food to an eight year old?..  At least we should be sorted for several days of maths home-schooling!!

Hopefully our food calculations won't be as complicated as this..

Postscript

Statue of St Christopher
patron saint of travel

*St Christopher (info from Wikipedia):  He lived in the 3^rd century, and it his thought he was called Reprobus.  Having met a hermit who instructed him in Christianity, Reprobus asked what he could do to follow Christ.  The hermit told him to fast and pray.  However, at 7 foot 6 inches tall, Reprobus didn’t think he could fast, so he was instead given the job of carrying people across a fast-flowing river.  Before he took this role, many people were drowning in their attempts.  Being very tall, he was well suited to the job and carried many people safely across.  One day, he set off with a child, but the river swelled and got deeper, and the current stronger, and he felt sure they would both drown.  When they made it safely to the other side, he told the child how frightened he had been, feeling like he had “the weight of the whole world on his shoulders”.  The child revealed himself as Jesus, and then disappeared.  Reprobus was not recognised as a Saint, and given the name St Christopher until the 7^th century.