After a few months' clearly identified work with some professionals, our catamaran, ‘Marie Soizic’ has turned out to be very sick. We have therefore turned into emergency surgeons a year and a half earlier than planned. We had to carry out no fewer than a hundred fibreglass repairs, the longest of which measured 7 meters. Until the moment when we decided to scrape underneath the boat. This small, superficial spot in fact revealed a nice crack over the whole thickness of the hull, full of rotten vinegar-smelling liquid, which finally stopped, but only after 4 meters or so along the nacelle/hull joint, a critical structural part on a catamaran. We didn’t really know whether to cry on discovering such a basic problem, or to be delighted that we had avoided discovering this in the middle of the Atlantic. We then rolled up our sleeves as high as they could go and dived headlong into the job at hand. We’re starting to get our heads above water now, we’ve taken off the ear defenders and cleaned the dust off our protective glasses. We have so much enthusiasm for this project, and are dying to get the work finished; we so want to share the positive energy of the Waterline project! We would like to see the end of it next summer, but we have given ourselves so much stress with dates, that we will be ready when the work on the boat will guarantee safe conditions for the crew and a long life for the project. A friend, a round the world woman sailor, said that life aboard a boat is: “one third a gift from the heavens, one third daily life and normal management, and one third where you ask yourself what the hell you’re doing there.” We hope we have already used up a large part of this last third…
Who: Constance and Luc, Julie, Arthur and Roxane
Where: In the boatyard in Brittany
Boat: Catana 44
Blog: www.waterline.fr
