Yrumoar is ours!

04 May 2010
I contacted the previous and original owner of the boat last night to see if he could tell me the history of the future Yrumoar. He told me that he is not much of a sailor but that a friend convinced him that sailing was the way forward and he then had her built by a boatyard somewhere in Cape Town. She was launched in 1994 and after some sea trials one of the guys working at the boatyard sailed her up from Cape Town to Richards bay and Bennie took delivery of her. Bennie went on about two short sails of about 15 miles in total out of the harbour and then decided that he is definitely not a sailor. She then landed up floating at the marina walk-on for a period of time before he had her transported to his farm where she stood on the hard for a number of years. Bennie then sold her to Greg who did some work on her to suit his requirements, who then sold her to us. Not much of an exploring history for her, but this is about to change.

Lolly Jackson was murdered last night somewhere in Kempton Park. This was the breaking news for the day. He was the owner of a few businesses here in South Africa but was most known for being the owner of a number of strip clubs named Teasers. I would assume that being in his kind of industry would attract a lot of enemies.

12 May 2010
The bond on our house was finally settled today and thus we will be able to pay the balance of the boat’s money across to Greg, making Yrumoar a reality at last. I have been trying to contact Greg all morning to make the final arrangements but it appears that he is not available. We now have a long wait till the 9th of June ahead of us before we can go down to Yrumoar. Everything has been hanging in libido for some time now waiting for the banks and lawyers and we have been unable to do anything or spend any money in case something went wrong with the bond application, and we had to come up with a different way of obtaining the money to pay for the boat. No, we did not really have a contingency plan but would have considered robbing a bank or doing a “cash in transit” heist if we had to.

Now the work begins, we have to finish some of the half finished projects around the house in order to get the house ready for rental or sale, we are not sure yet whether to rent it out or sell it. This decision will have to be made before December. Once the house is ready we have to start preparing the boat for the journey. We have given ourselves about a year for the preparations and sea trials starting from next year. However a wise sailor once told me “make no plans, and stick to it”. So we shall see.

13 May 2010
Sitting at my desk at work looking at the picture of Yrumoar, which is my screensaver on my computer, and I start to daydream. When we bought our last boat, Bluefin at the Vaal we went down afterwards and checked the mooring lines and made sure that they were in good condition. We had to replace some of them so we bought some rope and made new lines. We also had to get some fairleads and fit them in order to stop the chaffing of the lines on the fibreglass. Now our new boat Yrumoar is floating at ZYC in Richards Bay, which is one hell of a long drive away, and we haven’t been able to go down since she became ours to check the mooring lines or see if she requires fairleads. We are only able to go down in about 4 weeks time at the beginning of June, but I’m not sure if we will be able to wait that long. I keep thinking that since I myself haven’t made and tied the lines to the marina they may not hold, and off she will float on a journey all by herself. The other panic that I feel is that one of the through hull fittings has not been closed and she springs a leak, and the bilge pump fails, glug glug glug. Down she goes. I want to phone the yacht club and ask someone to go and check up if she is still floating where I last saw her, but don’t know a single soul at the club. We left in such a hurry last time that I forgot to get a number for Ian who’s boat, Ocean Spray, is moored across from Yrumoar. Ian is the only person that we met on our last visit that I can remember.

18 May 2010
We seem to have reached a point where we have nothing interesting to say anymore. It is becoming harder and harder to make up a conversation about the trip ahead as we seem to have discussed all that there is to say.

19 May 2010
Just when we thought we have no more to say Lola and I had a small celebration last night to celebrate that we have passed our SSB radio licence without writing the test again. Okay to explain, a few days ago we contacted ICASA and made an appointment to write our SSB radio licence exam. When ICASA sent us the study material we noticed that it is the same as the last exam that we have already written, some time ago. When we wrote this original exam we didn’t have the correct study material, and it was like writing a Geography exam after you have studied for History, but we all passed anyway. It so happens that we wrote both the VHF and the SSB exam that day using the VHF study notes that we got from Offshore Sailing Academy, so needless to say we had absolutely no idea as to some of the questions and what the possible answers should be, but as luck would have it, the exam was multiple choice and thus we must have guessed the correct options.
We also spoke about what each of us is expecting from this planned trip and I was very surprised that I had no idea that Lola was excited about such different things to me. Lola is looking forward to Home Schooling the kids and, I did guess this one, studying the history of the countries that we visit. I on the other hand, am looking forward to the actual sailing and crossing of oceans, also the time that can be spent alone whilst on watch, time to reflect.

We are both looking forward to the many different cultures of the people that we would meet, and of course the beautiful sites that we will see. In order to get some assistance in the finance department I told Lola that perhaps with the use of Paypal we could get interested people to “buy us a local food” from which ever country we would be visiting. I would then be the guinea pig and eat this foreign food on a short video that interested people could watch and they would then get the opportunity to experience the whole thing virtually. I am hoping that I don’t die from this as I believe that some countries eat very weird stuff like worms, rats and bat wings.