In 2016, it could be said, everything went according to plan. We moved our home to Ithaca and adapted to the life of living onboard, climbing up and down into cabins. Also, we got some confidence from Vasco sailing.
At the beginning of 2017, Pierre set 1st December as our departure date. Summer in South Africa is the season of visits by foreign cruising boats. We wanted to follow the same routine, which was the easiest choice for novice cruisers, like us. This would be the last year to prepare for our long voyage. It was supposed to be an exciting year, but it became the most tormented year of my life.
I need to trace the time back to Christmas 2016. We lifted Ithaca out of the water once more to maintain her bottom. This time, instead of outsourcing the work to contractors, we did it by ourselves. We were paying a lot of attention to details and striving for perfection, for example, grinding the hull; this item alone took twenty-five working days for four workers. We were charged per day at the boatyard. The longer we stayed on the hard, the higher the expenses grew. There were a few other things that needed to be done while the boat was out of the water. In the end, our estimated two to three weeks of repairs increased to three months. This greatly exceeded our planned budget.
Besides the maintenance issue, there was a new challenge we had to face in 2017, homeschooling. My husband and I decided to start homeschool one year in advance. If we found the textbooks or the school programs not suitable for us, we would still have an opportunity to change them.
Homeschooling, not only for children but also for Pierre and me, was a new thing we had never experienced before. We started by going to a Homeschool Exhibition in South Africa. During the exhibition, we found many different types of textbooks, workbooks, and teaching plans available for South Africa's curriculum. All of these are approved by the Department of Education. But how to lead and motivate children to follow the learning plan is much more difficult. We needed to change our family roles from parents to tutors. An adaptation process was necessary for all of us, but this adaptation process was carried out in the worst place, a super dirty, noisy boatyard.
The boatyard was in the middle of an industrial area. It was always dirty and muddy with debris from the boat work lying around; the bathroom was dirty in the same industrial way. We had to live on board in such unsanitary conditions.
In late summer, Durban is extremely hot and humid. Outside the boat, the workers were busy grinding the hull; inside, the children and I stayed below doing school work. The cabin was like an oven, super hot and almost thirty degrees Celsius, with no air-conditioning. We couldn't open the hatches for fresh air because of all the dust outside. The harsh sound of the electric grinders on the hull was transmitted directly into our eardrums and echoed in our brains. Sometimes, we had to play loud music to cover the noise. We used wet towels and electric fans to cool down ourselves a bit. Our journey into homeschooling was started in such a harsh environment, and it put our patience to an extreme test.
While I supervised the children's schooling, I also had to do remote work for my clients from time to time and manage the boat repairs outside.
Juggling all these new and strange balls in my hands, I felt like I was being tortured and became anxious. As the days living in the boatyard increased, the world got more upside down, including myself. Nothing was right, everything was getting darker and darker. Each little accident, such as a broken screw or a human mistake, could make me furious. I couldn't laugh, I couldn't cry, I was very depressed. Those were the darkest days since buying the boat. I felt I was close to losing my mind.
For Pierre, it also was not easy. The projects he worked on were about to go live. While he was managing the boat repairs, he also needed to work intensively, and often worked overtime on weekends.
The two of us were like gyros, spinning endlessly. How I wished for 12 more hours in a day!
To decompress, Pierre and I went to the gym. Also, one of our friends let us stay in his holiday apartment for a week just to give us a change. Other times, we drove back to the yacht club in the evening, having some drinks with our friends before going back to sleep onboard in the boatyard.
The day Ithaca was finally scheduled to go back into the water, I was extremely excited. I thought that the troubles were over. Who knew, this was just the beginning.
From the moment we moved the boat, things started to go wrong. First, the crane tyre burst: the move was cancelled that day. Three days later, we tried to get the boat back to the water for the second time. A few moments before the boat could touch the water, the travel lift had a problem, the chain lifting the boat got stuck in the pulley at the top. Therefore, we had to wait for a few more hours for the rising tide to float her. Afterwards, as we steered her back to the Marina, when entering the slip, the boat engine was suddenly out of order. The bow bumped into the cement pontoon at speed, whereas the boat was supposed to stop in front of it. The smooth front bow immediately pinched off with a half-inch size gash. We had just painted the boat with a new coat!
Later, we discovered that the shaft detached from the engine when we reversed. During the time Ithaca was out of the water, we needed to re-condition the shaft. Eventually, we found someone who could dismantle it and did the job. How come it was not assembled properly?! It was not clenched at all! What we didn't know was that later, the shaft would later become a nightmare on a trip at sea.
One day, we got a call. Pierre's father was suddenly admitted to the intensive care unit. He had gastrointestinal perforation. In the meantime, two close family members also passed away. Again and again, we had to fly inland to attend to family matters.
Our bad luck was not over yet. The life raft needed to be serviced every three years. When it was opened at the service centre, we were dumbfounded. A lot of water came rushing out of the carrying case, and most of the fittings inside were rusted and beyond repair. We were left with one choice only, buying a new one.
The troubles continued. While Pierre and I had a quick lunch outside a shop, a burglar jammed our car and stole all our important electronics, which included our laptops, iPad, and a hard drive with years of backup on it.
In that same year, we also had to sell our house. When we moved out of the big house, I had not yet been willing to sell it, but instead, I had planned to rent it out. However, in the following two years, the tenants kept on delaying the payments. At last, we had to ask a lawyer to fight on our behalf to evict a tenant out of our property. Unfortunately, by the time we sold the house, the property market missed the golden period. it had depreciated by a quarter when we finally signed the sales agreement of the house. My heart was in pain. The more painful thing was that we could not buy such a proud mountain house anymore when we came back from sailing.
Today, thinking of all the above troubles, it was wise to start homeschooling one year early. We didn't continue the teaching programs we started, which relied on computers and the internet. We chose to buy books, which were more suitable for unexpected communication problems at sea. Repairing the boat on our own was a necessary experience; this would help us be prepared for boat repairs in the future when going abroad. The loss of family members and the inexplicable financial losses all were testing our determination to sail.
All right, we were determined! Then, how about our ability to sail away? And were our sailing skills ready? Destiny soon arranged a storm in Durban and forced us into a preparatory exercise before the voyage.