As soon as we got back to Belfast I was away to visit my parents for a short while, so Beverley was the one that moved Salty Lass from Abercorn Basin to Bangor. To do so she enlisted a guy who is part of the Northern Ireland Facebook group. I had hope that Beverley would do the trip as a solo sailor, but it looks like that particular activity will have to wait until another day.
While I was still away Beverley did her first blowy day in Bangor blog, she had hoped that this type of blog would be later in the season, but it was the first of many blowy days and she just thought that it was ironic to be doing that kind of blog so early in the season.
A few days later I came back from seeing my family and we went over to Carrickfergus to finally meet up with Beverley's mum. We booked for two nights and Beverley's mum could see us the next day so seeing as we had time, I started in on cleaning Salty Lass from stern to bow. While I had been on a boat called Volupia he had said that they would be looking through the stuff they had on board and if they had not used it then they would get rid of it, so I decided that I would do the same with Salty Lass, the only difference being that we were talking about stuff that we had on board for three years. One of the things that we decided to ditch was a bridle, the previous owners had said that it was for lassoing a buoy, but when somebody had done that to one of the buoys laid by Liverpool Yacht club they had yanked the buoy straight off the mooring chain, so seeing as we would never use it for that and the rope that was used for the bridle was far too stiff for actually wrapping around the cleats, then this was one of the first things to go along with some tools that were so useless that I called them horse tools as I could see me shoeing horses with them rather than using them on a boat.
One I had cleaned out the stuff that we did not use, I started cleaning up Salty Lass, while I was cleaning I reflected on happiness. Happiness is having the time to do what you want to do. Now I know that really cleaning a boat is not everybody's idea of happiness but it certainly is mine.
The cleaning task too several days and while I was cleaning I wrote down all the projects that we wanted to do. Now seeing as we have been on Salty Lass for three years now, then the projects are a lot less, but there are still quite a few things that we would like to improve upon. We would also like to talk about various aspects of Sailing and boat life, but to do that then we need your feedback on what sort of projects that you are interested in. On top of that we finally have started a t-shirt shop where you can get your t-shirts. We only have simple designs but we hope people will like them and support us in that way.
Once we had got Salty Lass all ship shape it was time to fill the water tanks and get her prepared for visitors, as my sister and her husband was coming for a week. My sister is a big Game of Thrones fan, so we explored the country visiting various places like, the Giants Causeway, the dark hedges, Inch Abbey and the grave of St. Patrick. It was a packed week and a lot of fun, but seeing as we are a sailing channel the whole week boiled down to less than a minute on the screen.
Charging our batteries from the AC.
In between cleaning the boat, and seeing relatives one of the very small jobs that we did was to look at our sterling charger. With our charger it has three outputs, while we have only two battery banks, the house bank and the starter battery. We traced the wiring through the boat and we realised that we had the two charging units charging the starter battery while we had just one charging unit charging the house battery, so all we did was swap the cables around. This did have a positive effect on the batteries straight away but it was a few days later the effect could really be seen.
