Our third week afloat has been a quiet one weather wise, but frantic maintenance-wise. We focused on Anui’s galley revamp in our old home port. We are expecting the work to take two weeks, so we are at the halfway mark.

We did manage to escape on the weekend to Steamer Landing and had a nice time in sunny and calm conditions, which recharged us. We love the Gippsland Lakes. We needed those few days of peace before the madness started.

Galley Dismantling

The main reason for coming to the Lakes though is boat maintenance. We moved back to Paynesville for the work to begin!

What are we doing? Our original chest fridge-freezer unit gave up the ghost earlier this year. Following several ‘re-gassing’ attempts which did not last, we had to accept that after 26 years, it’s dead. As usual, no gear replacement on board is simple.

Substituting the unit like for like looked frightfully expensive! Anything with the word Marine in front of it is, and that’s just for the fridge only! Plus Chris had a love-hate relationship with this top loading system… well a hate-hate relationship, really! Diving headfirst to retrieve anything in there was just too frustrating and there has been a lot of swearing in the past years when trying to dig out specific items from the bottom of the blasted thing.

No matter what we replace it with, the original unit has to come out and it means a change to the cabinetry and the benches. The team for this delicate job is Tim Heaney, our Shipwright from Frecheville Heaney Boats with his very experienced cabinet maker David and second year apprentice Charlie. We are counting on them to do their magic so we end up with a practical set up that does not look like it has been cobbled together.

With limited space in the galley, we are replacing the unit with two 85l Dune 24 Volt fridges, side by side, front opening, and have also bought two drawer-freezers which are operating in the back storeroom and are so practical. Before leaving the marina, we bought the fridges, the freezers and some rolls of Laminex. While we stored all of this on board, you can imagine what the guest cabin looked like, not to mention the saloon… We made do with the cockpit fridge and the two new freezer drawers for refrigeration on this trip.

The first huge challenge was removing the old unit without damaging the surrounding panels! It looks like the bench was built around the original unit, so it took David and Charlie a day of chiselling and sawing to extricate it. In the end the chest was chopped in half and taken away. Nightmare!

We admit to walking away and leaving the boys to the job during the ugliest part. It was too hard to watch. But they took great care and all was good. And no matter what, the old unit had to come out.

And once it was out, the bench needed to be braced, which kept the guys busy for a couple of days. They strengthened the bench framework, made a solid base for the fridges to sit firmly in place, cut the cedar panel to fit around them so it all looks good, then worked out how to affix the two fridges to the base so they don’t move underway. It was a fiddly job.

When we got to the dry fit stage, we could all breathe a sigh of relief.

It was time to prep for the new laminate. They carefully removed some of the wood trims, and patched the holes where the old lids used to be, so the benches are ready.

And now templates are being made for the laminate to be cut to size. It will be glued on top of the old one. Doing it any other way would open up a can of worms and we did not want to go there!

But laying down the laminate is a job for next week, as is the final fitting of the fridges in place and connection to power and fans.

Other maintenance

As we mentioned in a previous post, our NKE wind instrument died at the beginning of this trip, giving us crazy readings. And when we say crazy, have a look at this!

We go by the numbers to raise the right sail combination and to reef, so it was really stressful to have to guess what the wind was doing on the way here, especially at night. We contacted Steve Cody, from Melbourne Marine Electronics to get a new one. Steve has been looking after us since we have had Anui and got us out of trouble with our navigation gear on a few occasions. Not only has he sent us a new wind sensor which is now installed at the top of the mast, much to our relief, but he might also join us for the return trip. It would be great to have an experienced sailor and NKE specialist on board!

And then there are the usual mix of little jobs, like gradually replacing the One Way Vision film peeling off some of the hatches, fixing leaky inspection hatches…

Some thoughts

Even though boat maintenance is an unrelenting strain to the point where some of our readers have been predicting our early retirement from cruising, we are actually not planning to get rid of Anui yet. We will continue to look after the old girl so we can enjoy offshore cruises while we are still fit enough! And we will probably continue to let off steam in this blog because boat ownership and maintenance are synonymous and it does drive us nuts.

Sailing looks dreamy from the outside – and many days it is: quiet mornings at anchor, kindly seas, stunning coastal scenery, breathtaking sunrises and sunsets. But behind every calm moment is the grit it took to get here: long hours of maintenance, unpredictable weather, and the patience to ride out whatever comes our way.

We often think about the two extremes of cruising: the stressors and the delights. I wish we were better at savouring the delights, enough that they fill our cup and more than compensate for those moments which are unsavoury! But it is not always the case.

We get caught up in two places: the past and the future. We ruminate on the past and all the things that did not go well: the weather, the breakdowns, the mishaps. Then we worry about the future and all the things that might not go well: not getting the weather for the return trip, the next broken bit to fix. The secret is to be better at focusing on the present and not projecting too far ahead, though it is easier said than done. It is also about trusting that the path will be the path, with all its twists and turns rather than a straight line, yet it will all work out.

Overall, there has been more light than shadow in our state of perpetual change over the past 9 years. And the transition from our totally vagabond life to this new chapter continues to cast both brightness and darkness, demanding adaptability.

Talk to you next week, hopefully with a completed galley revamp and an idea of when we will start our trip back to Melbourne. At this time of year, you do get periods of gentle Easterlies like we have been having this week. So there is hope!