Moving from surviving to thriving

It turned out that the Met Office decided that the weather on Sunday and Monday wasn't bad enough to be termed Storm Amy. Here, it was windier than Storm Floris and lasted a lot longer. Probably, 24 hours when it was mostly over 50mph and occasionally reaching 60mph.

It did mean some sleep disruption on Sunday night. We went to bed late and woke in a big gust at 5:45am as the boat shook quite violently. I responded by playing the Beach Boys - Good Vibrations very loudly and by drinking coffee 😀

However, we are clearly getting more used to this life. So, we managed to get some progress done, catchup on some sleep and have a good day.

Jane put some more insulation up in our cabin and finished the port side of the saloon. This is the base layer of insulation, which is 5mm self-adhesive closed-cell foam with a foil backing. The goal is for this to be the main way to avoid condensation on the hull. Then we will be adding 40mm of xps foam. That doesn't bend much so we again seal around the edges so we have a fairly airtight area between them. The xps will then be painted as the final surface (except in any hard wearing places where it will be covered).

Meanwhile, Dave progressed the electrics. A lot of this is getting better adapted to the rhythm and ordering of tasks. Partly that is because we are following an iterative "design" process rather than getting everything sorted up front. There are just too many unknowns and so much learning as we go for it to be possible to decide everything up-front.

Anyway, we now have our first item running properly off the 12V switch panel, and we have our first 48V battery bank fully connected. We have a fancy new 60V switch which handily displays the voltage whenever it is turned on. We know that bank is delivering 53.8V 😃

Today, is the only dry day for a while, so Jane is back to the washing. Dave is going to be working on the next battery bank and the Victron display screen to show data about the electrics.

Hopefully, also a walk later.

Meanwhile, we have also started doing some structured strength exercises (yes, we know how many times Dave "starts" things, hello ADHD). We have done it twice so far (you can follow us on Strava to encourage us :-) (Dave, Jane). We find that the YouTube channel "Will Harlow – Over-Fifties Specialist Physio": has a lot of helpful content now that we are old! 😏 This routine only uses resistance bands, and we can actually do in the main saloon (we have to take it in turns for the last 3 exercises). It is now setup as a workout on our Garmin watches, which should guide us through it each time.