I'm sitting in a cold living-room in Edinburgh, with three and a half weeks to go until we set off again. It's 13 years since we last set off to live on boats. This time we'll have the boys with us - Roo and Kit have already spent several weeks living on various boats during holidays. They've sailed from Edinburgh to Orkney and back, Edinburgh to Sweden and last summer from Edinburgh to the Scilly Isles. We've worked them up towards being able to live on a boat over the years. I think we've succeeded, and at the same time prevented them from realising how unusual this is and how lucky they are. A couple of years ago, Roo's friend Harris came to see Lucky Girl. As they were climbing up the stern ladder past the name, Roo said to Harris: "Our boat's called 'Lucky Girl', what's yours called?"
Things still on my to-do list:
- sell the tumble dryer (yawn)
- sell both cars
- organise insurance for the stuff we're leaving in storage
- alter our bank accounts & credit cards to our forwarding address
- arrange for proxy voting
- ship all our stuff to the marina in Spain
- take our 2 original paintings to Gareth and Sarah's house
- book flights back for Gareth and Sarah's wedding
- switch mobile phone plans to get more data (yawn)
- organise the boat lift-in for the day I arrive in Spain
We've booked onto the ARC (sorry James), so we now know we'll be leaving Gran Canaria on the 22nd of November bound for St Lucia. We would like to be in the Canaries for a month beforehand as a few people have said they'll visit us there, so we need to leave Gibraltar in the last week of September. As the boat is in A Coruña in NW Spain at the moment we have to do roughly 100 miles a month to get there. That doesn't seem too arduous. I didn't want to do the ARC because it is expensive and I feel we, (and our crew) have the experience and skills to be just as safe without it - if we depart on the same day as it does, then we still have the safety of other boats crossing at the same time. However, Helen is nervous about ocean crossing in a way that she can't rationalise right now (I'm sure she'll feel better after we've lived aboard for a while) and the ARC has a kids' club which will give the boys a definite opportunity to spend some time with other children in Gran Canaria and St Lucia, and also give them some people to talk to on the VHF during the crossing. I think that we and the boys will meet plenty of sailing families between A Coruña and the Canaries, but this is a guarantee.
We get asked a lot about schooling for the boys. We've spoken to their teachers and got their advice, I've just picked up £150's worth of Usborne books to accompany the ones we've already got. Helen thinks I'm being too organised. My plan for starting out is to sit down with the boys and work out together what skills they need to acquire and practice (eg. reading, writing, maths), then we can list some topics they'd like to cover (eg. volcanoes, fish, the Spanish Armada), and we can make sure that as we go through them, they cover each of the skills - it's all subject to change, so we'll see how it goes. I think it'll be good to agree a plan with them so that when I say to Roo: 'hey you haven't done some maths for a while', he has a record of it, and he can see for himself that he needs to spend some more time on it, rather than it being what Daddy reckons.
I am looking forward to having the house all packed up and arriving in Spain ready to start a new chapter of our lives.
