Lists and lists

I appreciate this may be a bit boring however I want to try and keep a record of all the stuff we have to do in the lead up to our adventure aboard Askari, so this is what we have been up to since the last post:

- Decision made on the storage of our stuff that will stay in Australia.

- Medical and dental appointments including vaccinations. Carolyn also attended a First Aid Course for Remote Locations. It was really useful, although did not really deal with prolonged management of injuries or situations. We did have some fun with stick on injuries and I had to bandage a guy with a huge nail thorough his head - not sure you'd want that on a boat or this.....

Glad this was fake!

- US visa applied for - interview this week. You cannot just turn up with an ESTA on a private boat so we are hoping to get a 5 year multi entry visa. It took half a day to work through all the stuff online - especially as they wanted full details of every trip Andrew has made to the US in the last 5 years plus a list of the countries he has visited in that period. We got to about 30 but I'm sure we might have missed some.

- Sat Phone bought - we have decided to us our HF radio as the primary source of communications offshore, however we thought it was prudent to have a Sat Phone as a back up.

- Spares list reviewed and marked up ready for our meeting in February with Oyster. Another very long job as the list of 'suggestions' runs to 17 pages. One good thing about moving your home aboard is that we will not need to buy all those small household gadgets. However, the boat needs a lot of spares. When we married the Oyster list up with our existing equipment list, we still have alot to spend - which luckily has been budgeted for.

- Rigging plan signed off - required an emergency Skype meeting with the fantastic Jon at Dolphin Sails who really helped us figure out which lines we would like to come back to the cockpit and which can stay at the mast.

- Final Foreign Exchange Transaction completed. Andrew being smart arranged to lock in our currency exposure for the purchase of Askari with payments timed to match our contract. We are a little ahead as we arranged for Oyster to delay the build so she got to stay inside during most of the UK winter. It's quite nice to know the cash is there even if she's not paid for yet.

- BBQ ordered - most of the stuff Oyster do really well but BBQs is not one of them; I guess maybe we have become too Australian over the last few years and our BBQ set up is very important. After a lot of discussion we decided this was best left for us to do. So we've ordered an Australian Sovereign BBQ and will fit it ourselves.

- Drogue ordered - for the non sailors this is a piece of equipment you through over the back of the boat to slow it down and it can also be used as an emergency steering device. We did a lot of research and went for the Para Anchor Drogue which works like this:

- Finally we have started packing stuff to take to the UK in Feb. We'll take our warm clothes for the trip and leave them there with a few other things including Andrew's new drone - more on that later!