One of the items in the Yachtmaster syllabus is "Preparing yacht for sea and for adverse weather" so Beverley and I decided to chat about that and how we always prepare Salty Lass for storms even when we go out sailing on a nice sunny day. That way when the **** hits the fan, which it does, we have less to think about.

It was crazy, we had spent a whole day filming and when the video was half way through, Beverley decided that it had to go. So with just the one day to film and edit we decided to have a fire side chat and hopefully that would work. We even decided that we would have our chat on Beverley's side of the boat, just for a little bit of variety.

The first thing that we chatted about was our very first affiliate link for Mr. D Cookware. This is a thermal cooker that we use all the time on Salty Lass, because we can cook a meal and when we are out sailing all we need to do is serve it out of Mr. D so we are quite happy to say that our Mr D pot has been good for us.

So Beverley had been reading an article recently on what to do when a storm comes and one of the items on the list was close your sea cocks, while another was rig your lifelines. as we don't want to be worrying about these things when we are out, we close our sea cocks and rig our life lines before we leave port.

So one of our items on our check list is rig the jack lines, this just means we attach our jack lines while we are in port before we go out to sea, so that they are there when we need them.

Realistically, Beverley does worry a lot, but what it means is that we talk about alternate plans all the time, that way when **** happens I already knew what the alternate plan was so I just did that so what I was here was mentally prepared.

So there are simple things that we do to prepare the boat, just before we leave the dock like make sure all our hatches are closed, make sure that your life lines are on and make sure that your through holes are closed.

So one of the things that we do on Salty Lass is put fuel conditioner in our tanks. This fuel conditioner keeps diesel bug at bay and helps keep your fuel clean. We may add a pre fuel filter at one time, but for now the fuel conditioner is keeping our fuel nice and clean, so much so that at our last service our filters were still nice and clean.

By keeping your boat well maintained then you are not having to do deal with silly stuff while you are out at sea. For example Beverley forgot about the nut on the top of the diesel filter and in this case we talked to other boat owners and they reminded us what to do. Could you do this when you are out at sea, well the answer is "No". Even doing simple stuff like changing coolant can be difficult, so having a well maintained engine is really important. But even doing simple maintenance like we do is not going to save you from other stuff that can go wrong with your engine like the started motor failing so these are other checks that you should do every now and then to make sure that your engine is in good condition. Its one of the reason that we like to keep our engine compartment nice and clean.

So some of the things on our checklist are through holes. When you are going out to sea, close your through holes. At some point, these through holes will be in the water and when that happens a syphon can be generated and all of a sudden you have water coming into our boat. When you leave your boat, close your through holes, we have seen one boat on You Tube sink because they did not close their through hole and we have seen a boat in a marina sink, just because they had left their boat and a pipe came off and all of a sudden the pipe sank and that was a very expensive boat.

Another item on our checklist, is our jack stays, when we are out sailing then we generally have them on the boat, but we have them on the checklist because when we leave a marina after a long time then they will be off. Now on Salty Lass we have two different life lines, the first is a two meter lifeline which we use in the cockpit while we have another lifeline that looks like a Y for going forward so that you can move about the boat from our jack stays to a hard point at the foot of the mast. Now I have had to do this in that when we went around Chicken Rock, I had to go forward and tether the sail down, so having this Y tether just makes things as safe as they can be.

Now our checklist gets updated on a regular basis because we were asked what would we do if our engine failed, and the answer is unfurl the Genoa, but we couldn't do that just because of the fact that it is attached to the pulpit, so now we will get that line ready just in case.

After that we just asked what people wanted for us to cover, so that we can still achieve our goal of achieving our Yachtmasters