Discovering that our outboard engine was leaking fuel on departure day from Livaditis boat yard was disappointing. Finding out that the replacement gaskets would take 3 days to arrive from Athens was crushing.

We had no other choice we'd have to splash A B Sea into the water and motor over to the small harbour at Limni and tie up there for a few days.

Xaris from the boat yard keeps his fishing boat at Limni harbour and had expla...

It was July the 3rd, the clock was ticking.

We'd paid 113 Euros (AU$185) for the Greek cruising tax for the month of July. It was now a case of use it or lose it and we didn't want to lose it.

The race to the finish line was on and we had a proposed splash day of Tuesday 7th July.

Small but important

On a boat even the smallest tasks are important and before we could splash we had many small jobs to complete.

Our first jobs was to...

With the propeller shaft back in place and coupled to the back of the gearbox, it was now time to reattach the air intake/turbo/exhaust system components back onto the engine.

In theory it all sounds so simple. Place the unit in position, tighten up four nuts, clip on the air filter, bolt on the exhaust mixing elbow and reconnect the various hoses. In practice the job took 5 hours.

A diesel engine sitting on a bench in a works...

Recently it's been a lesson in how to go quickly… Very slowly.

The hull, keel and rudder needed a lot of TLC and that meant applying various compounds to the surfaces. It all starts with sanding and/or grinding back the surfaces to ensure that any old flaky antifoul or primer are completely removed.

In the case of the keel it sometimes meant grinding it back to bare iron. Going back that far meant that the surface was now pockma...

A few people have questioned why we left so many jobs so late into our stay on the hard at Livaditis Boat Yard on Evia island, Greece. That's a good question and the reasoning as to 'why' is many faceted.

Let's go right back to when we arrived at the boat yard on October 26th 2019, at that point in time we knew we had at least two major maintenance jobs that needed doing before we could go back into the water and sail off into...

Let's start off by talking about the cutlass bearing saga. We figured that while we were hauled out at the boat yard here on the Greek island of Evia that we should complete some of the bigger maintenance jobs that should be done every 5 years or so and can't be done while A B Sea is in the water.

Removing the prop and prop shaft meant that we could replace the stern gland and the cutlass bearing. Both relatively straightforwar...

On October 26th 2019 as A B Sea was hauled out of the water I stood at the helm filming and said "It'll be 5 months before she sees that water again." Then the shit hit the fan with Covid-19 and here we are almost 8 months later and we're still sitting on the hard in the boat yard at Limni on the Greek island of Evia.

I'm reminded of that moment because this week has been a very busy week at the boat yard with several Greek fis...

It is now a month since the cutlass bearing arrived in Athens, Greece and it has still not been delivered to us here at the boat yard. Ironically the courier company who has the item in their possession is called Speedex. Yeah right.

Strangely other packages have been delivered to us without any delays or problems, one even made it to us all the way from America. I didn't remember ordering anything from the US but as I opened t...

I awoke to the same sound I fell asleep with. The sound of continuous raindrops descending steadily onto the deck of A B Sea.  My first thought was "There go the plans for applying epoxy primer to the keel." My second thought was "I really need to empty my bladder and I'm going to get drenched."

Because A B Sea is still on the hard stands in the boatyard we have use of the bathroom facilities in one of the onsite apartments, it...

The great battery meltdown of October 2019, which we showed you in video #094, opened up a whole new learning curve about storage, usage and management of electrical power on board a sailing yacht.

Moving forward to May 2020 and we decided that a job which had been slated for when we finally got back to Turkey would be brought forward because time was moving on and the new batteries were already 7 months old and still configure...