Songbird, our old home, is back on the market, now under Danish flag.

Bittersweet looking at the photos. We've lost touch with the current owner after some weird emails, but it looks like he took reasonable care of the boat. There's some changes, but a lot of our old stuff is still there, even the same spray bottles under the companionway steps :)

There's a new chartplotter and radar installed, which is good, and an offset mounted hydrovane windsteering which didn't really fit, but at least it looks like the swim-ladder is still usable.

Seems the good old Volvo Perkins Prima is still ticking too.

Sad to see the cockpit varnish hasn't been maintained. I spent a lot of work restoring that. Oh well.

Probably still a great boat!

https://www.yacht.de/en/yachtmarkt/gebrauchtboote/boot/655709/

#Sailing #Songbird #CruisingLife

Sicily, six years ago. Covid lockdown in effect. Our friend got trapped ashore, living on his boat atop a ladder, work unfinished and unable to launch, even if there had been a crane operator.

The boatyard workers gave him the key to the gate and told him they were shutting down until further notice, good luck and by the way there's no running water.

They left him "Merkel" the boatyard dog, too.

#Sicily #TheBoatyard #CruisingLife #Memories #CovidLockdown

Typical sailor meetup: Share cake and expertise, in this case about varnish.

Yes that pack says 80 quid on it and that was back in 2016.

#CruisingLife #Varnish #Memories

Sorting photos, which requires reading old logbook entrys to find out which place the photo was taken in (based on timestamp).

Typical for night sailing, things go clunk and you never find out what they were 😸

"Something wenk clunk while motoring on Friday 22:30 and the saildrive started making intermittent weird sound. Probably hit something. Put gear in neutral and sound stopped. Tried reverse and heard another small clunk - after this the weird sound in forward was gone, so probably wrapped something around the propeller and putting it in astern got rid of it. Anchored in Siracusa harbour [..]. Dived the next day to look at propeller, no signs of anything out of the ordinary."

#Sailing #CruisingLife #Memories #ThingsThatGoClunkInTheNight

2019 aboard Songbird, installing the replacement watermaker in the engine compartment.

Our boat had the most accessible engine room of any 40 footer I've seen (yes, including the Sirius 40 DS), but it was still a cramp inducing job.

#Memories #CruisingLife #Sailing #Boating

Cruising on our small sailboat, I pulled out the ColReg's for a little light reading.

#humour #cruisinglife #georgianbay