England, bloody England.
There are things to learn everyday. Dave Jurkowski flew in as originally scheduled and when I arrived with Kuba, he was already well settled in with tons of local knowledge that made our adaptation easier.
He told me that June is monsoon season in Southern England. My oilskins, wellingtons and umbrella were in the container somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, delayed only another few days perhaps.
So, no boat and lots of rain, no container and rain, no internet anywhere, no local cell phone service and rain, driving on the left side of the road, electrical outlets big and dangerous, drain pipes too small not only in the gutters, but also in the tiny little shower booths, in the Lilliputian bathrooms, in the tiny rooms of our new American Swan 45 headquarters, at Prince Cohort. Our new home and rain.
Bad drainage was hunting us throughout our European trip everywhere. In Amsterdam, Visby, Gustavsberg, my parents bathroom in Szczecin, Port Napoleon, Bonifacio, Porto Rotundo and Palma. Shower water doesn’t want to go into the drain, spills around, floods the floors and goes down the stairs instead swirling into the hole. It is fascinating.
HYS is the place all the serious players keep their boats. It is a very tight marina without an inch to spare, both at the dock and on the hard. People in the thousands go racing every single day. They get out of their cars fully dressed in oilskins, hats, gloves, safety harnesses and go down to their boats dragging their tethers along the dock. Nobody brings spare stuff like sun glasses or sun screen lotion. No backpacks even for the professionals.
They go sailing and than without any complaint or big fuss, drink beer in one of the 6 pubs in Hamble before returning home. The cars come full, and the whole familias sail together just like the Rojeks, but usually include 3 or 4 generations.
That is Hamble; 6 pubs, the post office, the grocery store, one single souvenir kiosk carrying the legendary Sturgeon and some marine ciackas and 4 marinas with a combined fleet of some five thousand sail boats plus 18 or 20 small power boats. Lovely.
On Saturday they had an annual race around the island with 1,800 boats on the starting line at 4AM. By noon, everybody was back, drinking in those 6 pubs or looking for their illegally parked cars with their wheel on the right, having been removed in the meantime by the forklifts making the beep, beep noise.
It is hard to understand these people. They lie too! Everybody I met had claimed that today’s weather is strange and unusual and that it was a beautiful and sunny day until yesterday.
The last time I had been in England was 38 years ago; on my last day my uncle Guga took my sister and I to see “THE GOLD FINGER”, my first Bond, and it was opening night.
The weather definitively got worse since then, but the roads are better and the food in most cases is quite good, service too, especially if you speak Polish.
On Thursday P&M notified me that, “the ship has arrived last night and we shall unload at noon in Southampton.” We rushed to be there early, expecting tight security and bureaucratic procedures taking hours, since it is the busiest cargo port in United Europe.
On the way along the river we passed the large and brown Suomigraht with a bunch of boats on deck sailing slowly towards terminals. They lie because they are Brits?
No security, no IDs, no wavers to sign. You can drive into a harbor and they will give you directions at the gate, even if you have an accent; so we are much safer in America I guess.
Somebody made a loading mistake in Newport and our boat is not in range of any of the ships three cranes!
There are three ways of dealing with the problem:
- 1. Go to Rotterdam unload other boats and come back.
- 2. Turn the ship around, get a land crane, unload the boat and move the ship, drop the boat into the water, while the ship is being held out by tugs, bring the ship back to the dock and unload the cradle.
- 3. Remove the rigs from Falcon and Better Than… and reach the boat with the crane no. 2.
Dave and I joked that maybe we could heel the ship and swing the hook at an angle… Well, that is what they did.
The ships captain pumped water ballasts to heel the ship 6 degrees and the crew moved the boat on the cradle to meet the hook with a narrow 5mm off the mast. It was raining and blowing and we were all numb, but we got her off the ship with only a bent windex.
The container followed 3 days later with our van, which has the wheel on the left side, and at that moment it stopped raining for a whole 10 minutes.
Dave, Kuba and I worked long wet hours to make up for the lost time. Surrounded by other Swans, we got all the advice we could absorb from the America’s Cup people and Don.
By the end of the week she was all shiny and smooth. I figured out the electrical conversions and we had only few projects left for Cowes.
Weighing went well. She made the class minimum by 46kg. For the first time I was grateful for the precipitation.
We loaded the van and raced Kuba (who was on on the slow ferry) to Cowes.