It is one of these periods when we feel we bought ourselves a hell of a lot of work with our catamaran, but we love this 20-year-old lady. Our philosophy with looking after Anui is to do as little as possible but as much as necessary. Some problems cannot be ignored, like a troubled engine or a failing anchor winch. Others you can defer for a while, but eventually you have to deal with them.

Repairs Update

We are progressing! Trent at 143 Boat Building has been busy. The new coupling for the starboard engine has been ordered and is on its way from Selva (Italy), the new anchor winch motor is installed, the NKE autopilot is in, although none of this was straight forward… nothing ever is!

And then we have the cosmetic side of things – not essential, but it falls into the “it’s bugging us, so let’s attend to it” category. Geoff, our gun painter from Millenium Marine Painting, is doing his magic. We got him to tackle repairs on both hulls which had been poorly handled by somebody else two years ago. It irked us to see these blemishes on our beautiful boat and to us they stood out like dog’s balls! It is a bit scary when the process starts: grinding, filling, sanding, filling again, sanding, undercoating, sanding, spray painting, polishing. It looks worse before it looks better. The gallery below shows the progression. Today as we post this, spray painting is happening!

Other small improvements

While stuck at The Boat Works, we are attending to anything not quite right – might as well use the time and facilities! These include:

• Replacing the old analog plasma TV which was about to die with a 12V LED Smart TV – Netflix here we come!
• Getting Ryan at 143 Boat Building to adjust our cedar TV cabinet since the new television occupies less space than the original one. A new shelf and piano hinged door will be added.
• Getting our dinghy repaired as it was taking in water between the RIB and the aluminium floor.
• Getting a new mainsail headboard pulley made so the 12mm halyard runs through properly. The existing pulley was designed for a 10mm halyard and failing.
• Ordering a Garmin Echomap Plus, a small sounder for the dinghy that will enable us to survey the bottom and build a contour map of unchartered reef entrances and lagoons before committing to bringing the big boat in.
• Re-planting our little herb garden after a scale insect invasion, much to Bengie’s munching pleasure.

With everything that has been going on, we have not felt we could get away from the shipyard and this has been a bit frustrating. The weather has not helped either – frequent showers, strong wind… But we keep dreaming and preparing thoroughly for what we hope will be our biggest reef explorations to date.

Although we have been struggling with being hemmed in, constantly dealing with maintenance and its escalating costs, in the scheme of things we are more fortunate, freer and safer than many people around the world. We thank our lucky star we live in Australia.