The clean up week: Honeymoon or boat maintenance excursion?

Boats take a fair bit of work and we've done a lot of work to get the good ship Fathom ready to join us on our honeymoon. Since we've been her custodians, she's shed 30 years of paint which has left her with a nice clean bottom and newly painted topsides. Our last major job was steam bending a new wheelhouse roof. All of this work means she's much more sea-worthy than when we found her down Wootton Creek.

Whilst we've done a lot of work on the essential bits we haven't actually given the interior much work or in fact cleaned it at all, ever. The idea of spending over a month on her filled us with dread so we cracked open a new bottle of Cillet Bang and set to work scrubbing the poop decks. It took us an entire week to empty and clean the boat and as suspected we found many, mostly oily delights. Some highlights were the mystery tea bags we'd shoved in a cupboard that smelt only of diesel and some out-of-date rice pudding that we didn't buy.

Finally, she was clean inside! After a last-minute stop at the local chandlery for a new set of head sail sheets (the ropes that control the big sail at the front). I noticed that Andy had added some painter's tape and a new set of paintbrushes to our basket. I'm now concerned that our honeymoon may turn into a boat maintenance excursion instead. Luckily for our marriage, I really like sanding and painting old things. Hopefully, no major fixes will be needed whilst we're away on honeymoon, our first week will be spent doing short-shakedown sails to expose any weak points before we leave The Solent via The Needles for the open sea.

Our last task before leaving Bembridge was to fill the bilges up with the leftover booze from the wedding before preparing to set off from our home port of Bembridge aiming for our first stop 13 nautical miles away, Cowes!

We'll be arriving in Cowes during Cowes week so it'll be like merging onto the M25 with a tractor at rush hour with no lanes, surrounded by F1 cars driven by chaps in red trousers. Wish us luck!