He is, after over a year of it sitting in its box, finally installing the remote mic for our Icom MC-505 VHF.

I know, I know - shock, deep breath, have a sit down and a glass of water.

But that’s not the most surprising thing.

The other week James serviced someone’s boat, which naturally included an oil change. He decided to put on an old t’shirt for the job, but didn’t change out of his his new shorts. Inevitably, he came back to Milestone with oil all over them. To his credit he kept them clean throughout the service - but then he stepped off the boat, went straight through a rotten pontoon board and the oil he was holding ended up on his shorts. I couldn’t help but snigger and utter something along the lines of “serves”, “you” and “right”.

So, the most surprising thing right now - and I did more than one double-take when I noticed this - is that James has actually taken off his recently purchased clothes, and put on some tatty, old clothes while he’s installing the remote mic.

That’s correct. James is actually wearing old clothes to do a job on the boat.

I know. Gobsmacked.

He’s just crawled back under the cockpit sole - I must dash, sir requires his sidecutters…

Wednesday had just arrived when James jumped up to look out of the saloon, where he noticed that two of the Clipper 68s had arrived back from their round-the-world  jaunt.

I’m not going to bother writing anything more about the race as you can find everything you need to know on t’interwebz, but this is hot-off-the-press news - they are but metres from our current berth!

James poked his head out of the door and contemplated going to catch their lines - it will be great to greet the familiar skippers and crew who departed from this exact marina less than a year ago - but rembered an incident that happened exactly this time last year…

Ready and waiting on the pontoon, James was eager to catch a Clipper boat’s lines. A Clipper came alongside, and the crewman on the bow - somebody confirmed to have just become one of an elite few to circumnavigate the globe under sail - threw James the bow line. Not just one end of a bow line with a bowline in the end, but yes, the entire bow line. James, utterly bewildered, caught the coil of warp and asked the crewman “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Err, tie it on the cleat?!” the crewman glared back

James’ reply was not made of words, but expressions. He watched as the wind blew the bow off and the skipper shouted. He shouted quite a bit, apparently.

I say no more. The Clarence Tavern will be glad to hear of your return.

A couple of weeks ago we met John and Russell, aboard John’s Witch of Albion, on the pontoons at the Folly Inn. We were pleased to meet them as the entire pontoon seemed full of OAPs; John and Russell were younger.

James and I went ashore for a BBQ, then headed back to miley for an early night (hah!). As we came alongside miley in our tender, we could hear some music playing and saw John and Russell sitting in their cockpit. As we climbed aboard miley, they asked us if we’d like to join them for a drink. Of course we would - but just the one, we’re headed for an early night.

As soon as we stepped into Witch’s cockpit, that was it. Our priorities for miley changed instantly.

Sure, we could forgo fixing the autohelm; the sink in the heads could wait; the dying bowthruster battery would be put on hold. But we had to buy some cockpit speakers. And a subwoofer. And some bookshelf speakers for the saloon. John’s music system engulfed us, and we were filled with envy.

James has always said we need cockpit speakers, and whilst I’ve always agreed, I’ve never really done anything about it (I generally pay for boat bits).

Yesterday - less than two weeks later - we opened the door at my parents’ house to a UPS delivery man. I greeted him with a “Thank God for that!”, we paid £15.11 in import duties (VAT and handling fee) and took ownership of a pair of JBL ms9200 marine 6×9 speakers. British retail price: £160. We paid: £105 inc. import duties from the USA. Cockpit IBE [In Boat Entertainment, of course] here we come!

As well as sorting out the cockpit speakers, we also wanted to do something with the audio setup inside. Until yesterday, we were driving two 13cm Pulse component speakers through a 2 x 90w Pulse amp, connected to James’ Savic 55wx4 car head unit. Whilst the setup held sentimental factor - my dad designed the speakers and amp and had them manufactured when he was in his 20s; he ran a car-audio company called Pulse, and Aston martin even fitted the systems to their cars - the speakers were mounted in the headlining so they just sounded crap. Unfortunately miley has a lack of decent mounting space on bulkheads, especially for something like speakers.

Whilst James was still keen on trying to fit some 6×9s somewhere inside, we both knew there isn’t really anywhere to mount them. So, we thought about bookshelf speakers. I had some Gale 3020s at my parents’ house, which sound amazing for what they are but unfortunately are rather too big to fit anywhere onboard.

So, whilst waiting for the UPS man to turn up, we made a trip to Richer Sounds. We took my audiophile father with us and listened to a few sets of small, cheapish bookself speakers. In the end we settled for a pair of diddy Q Acoustic 1010i speakers, which are solidly built, sound great for what they are, and have one bass port and the low end to go with it. At £60 a pair they are a real bargain - but here’s a tip: our speakers were £70 in-store but £60 on their website - they were more than happy to match the web price in-store.

We left my parents’ house at 3:15pm, and 7 hours later, we invited a friend onboard and were sat in the cockpit, hurricane lamp glowing, cockpit & bookshelf speakers singing sweet sweet music. (Subwoofer still to come.)

IBE is a necessity, kids.

Just a quick post to say a big thank you to Jerry the Rigger for our lurvely new furling line.

We had a very fast sail over to the Folly at the end of May, with my friend Rad onboard. I met Rad on my inline skating instructors’ course and he has never been sailing before. It turned out to be a bit of a wet and windy introduction! We had a steady F7 on the way across, tacking all the way, but of course being in the Solent the water wasn’t quite so rough, thankfully.

We’re still learning about miley: the best helming position is to stand up legs a-kimbo with a foot on a cockpit locker lid either side, so it’s easy to see over the raised saloon. We hit a big wave and I ducked to hide behind the pilothouse (which works a charm) but unfortunately I was a little too enthusiastic and whacked my chin against the grab rail thing on the binnacle. Ouch.

Still, we had a cracking sail, and a well-deserved evening in the Folly to relax… a delicious meal followed by, you guessed it, a spot of table dancing. And boy did we dance!

On the way back to Gosport we uncurled the gibanoa along with main and mizzen. Unfortunately the furling line jumped all the way off the furling drum; we noticed this not long before we wanted to curl away the gibanoa, so decided to leave it up and furl it away in Portsmouth Harbour as it was a bit blowy out there.

Oops! Wrong decision! If we thought it was blowy in the Solent… well, the wind in the harbour was really going for it! Rad and I went up to the bow and tried to go up and furl it away by hand, but we were no match for it. And it really was blowing! So I went back and took the helm whilst James scuttled forward. He found a better grip on the foil and managed to slowly, painfully furl it away by hand. Then he reached a sticking point - not only had the furling line jumped out of the drum, but it had wrapped itself up in a big mess around it, so James couldn’t furl any more away.

Cue the command for a knife! We have lots and lots and lots of knives onboard. It was just my luck that the one I grabbed to give to Rad to take to James happened to be the bluntest of the lot. Oh well, another lesson learnt - knives are now sharpened!

James managed to cut the furling line and curl the rest of the gibanoa away and we made it back alongside in Royal Clarence. What an action-packed first sail for Rad! He loved it, and was an excellent crew member - welcome back any time.

Finally happy to be back out on the water after out rotten bowsprit fiasco, we couldn’t believe something else had now gone wrong that would prevent us from going out again - so we told Jerry the Rigger of our predicament, and as ever, Jerry came up trumps within a couple of days - with a brand new Selden furling line!You can’t beat Jerry for customer service and a real desire to help sailors out.

Thanks Jerry! We owe you a sail!

Jerry working on Miley’s rigging

I’m not going to write a lot for this post, because the picture says it all, but I’ll give you a quick overview of our bowsprit project.

We discovered that Milestone’s bowsprit was totally rotten waaaaaay back in October, and ever since, James’ friend Al Jones has been lovingly crafting Miley her brand spanking new nose from some Douglas Fir we sourced from Travis Perkins. James’ parents offered to cover the cost of the new bowsprit for our Christmas present, so we are very grateful for that.

It’s taken a long time and has thrown lots of little challenges at us.

Unfortunately our windlass is mounted on top of the bowsprit so it was destroyed when we took the old bowsprit off. Well, it was already pretty much detroyed; the front of the casing had corroded and it was only standing on its rear mounts, which had corroded to the mounting screws so James literally had to saw the mounts off to remove it from the deck. So that’s x1 new windlass on the shopping list……. gulp. I’ll write a separate post about that one!

Finally we got to the stage where we were ready to varnish our new bowsprit - or Bowie as I’ve been calling it (names are very important). Of course, with every step forward, we seemed to come across another little hiccup - we’d forgotten to round off the edges, which needed to be done before we varnished it, so we had to wait until James was next off work to take Bowie back up to Northampton, where Al lives, so he could round the edges off. Wow, it looked good.

So now we were ready to varnish! Hang on… varnishing… England… cold weather… well, that was never going to dry on the deck, and we live aboard so it’s not like we have a heated spare room. Not to worry; James soon sorted out a heated office that we could use (thanks Ted!).

Nine lovely coats of Epifanes later, we arranged a date with Al to come down and Sikaflex that beauty onto Miley’s foredeck. Two tubes of Sikaflex later…

Miley's new bowsprit

Bit better than this, no?

Miley's old bowsprit

A million thanks to Al, and James’ parents.

Three cheers for Miley’s new nose!

Coming alongside the fuel pontoon
we decided to have another go
as for some reason we didn’t know
the wind was having more of an effect on us
that we had expected.
There was a bloke waiting to grab our lines
but we calmly went round again, taking our time;
it was only then we noticed
our mizzen was still hoisted.

jellyellie, 2009

Of course, James managed to pass each exam with pretty much 100%, top of his class.

James studied with a group of friends mainly from our sailing club, and the tutor was somebody James knew. James had previously tried to complete the certification via a correspondence course, but felt he just didn’t have the self-motivation to study regularly. Working in a group really suited him: they covered the syllabus over three weekends, with a few weeks in between each section to go away and revise at home. Well, James kind of skipped the latter part - all the more irritating that he passed with best marks. Anyway, I’m not bothered; he still has my RYA Yachtmaster Ocean theory to beat… now that was a *&£^$*…

Your feedback is vital: please leave a comment sharing your experiences with mobile broadband around the UK. Please include the marina, network, and comments. I will put the data from your comments into this main post, and keep this updated regularly.

It’s rubbish.

Really, really, pants. More pants than the pair of my underwear that has somehow been on our foredeck for the past god-knows-how-long.

If you’re lucky enough to even be able to logon to the service - normally only a possibility at high tide - you’ll be waiting a la 56k dial-up for web pages to load. YouTube? BBC iPlayer? BT Openzone has never heard of photos, let alone video streaming. Even browsing friends’ photos on Facebook is normally impossible, let alone uploading our own. This explains the lack of photos on this blog; we have to wait ’til we visit our parents, with their cable broadband, to do such advanced things as uploading photos. And this in 2010!

So what to do?

The first part of the decision was easy. We pretty much had two options:

1. Buy a Wi-Fi range extender, such as 5milewifi (costs a few hundred £ to import from the US), which would enable us to connect to other, better, Wi-Fi networks in the area - such as Oceanwave at the marina next door. We would then need to sign up to this Wi-Fi service, which costs:
   • £5 for 1 day
   • £15 for 1 month
   • £30 for 3 months
   • £110 for 1 year
2. Choose a 3G mobile broadband dongle. Either pay-as-you-go or contract, prices are around £15/month for 3GB data. Plug it straight into our laptops, and wherever we have mobile network coverage, we would have the internet.

Straight away, the upfront cost of a Wi-Fi range extender/aerial booster writes Option 1 off for us. We simply can’t afford to spend a few hundred pounds on top of the cost of the actual Wi-Fi service. It’s a shame, as benefits include being able to pickup Wi-Fi networks whilst at anchor close to the shore. Signing up to next door’s Oceanwave Wi-Fi also meant we’d be able to logon to that network whenever we visited a marina that also had Oceanwave; but signing up to the cheapest option, a 1-year contract, would be a tie that we don’t want.

So, what about a 3G mobile broadband dongle? Well… it seemed perfect. Quite simply, it means we would be able to access the internet wherever we have mobile coverage for the network we choose - and for the majority of our sailing at the moment, we are nearly always close enough to the shore to receive good coverage, so not only would we be able to use the internet in harbour, but we could check the weather whilst out for a jolly and anchored for lunch (hah, take that, expensive 5milewifi). And we could use it in all the marinas we go to, not just the ones with the same Wi-Fi service. Not only are dongles useful for onboard, but give us internet access when travelling in the car, away on business etc.

Our decision was made. 3G dongle was the way forward. But now came the hard part: which network? Which tariff? Pay-as-you-go or contract?

Looking around, it seemed there wasn’t much competition between networks. All of the major networks now offer mobile broadband - O2, 3, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange. All of them showed as providing a good signal where we are currently moored. So how to choose?

We decided that we didn’t want to sign up to a 12/18 month contract: we don’t know what we will be doing that far ahead into the future. But pay-as-you-go is not very convenient and works out more expensive than a contract.

I stumbled across an option that gave us the compromise we were after: a rolling one-month contract, with the convenience of a direct debit, and the freedom to cancel with 30-days’ notice. Most of the networks offer these one-month plans. Prices for 3GB of data transfer are the same across the board at £15/month for 3GB data, but the upfront cost of the dongle varies: it’s £9.99 from 3, but an expensive £29 from Orange. However this may be irrelevent, and your choice easy, if you know that Orange has much better coverage than 3 in your marina (if you have a good 3G mobile signal from that network, their mobile broadband signal will also be good, and vice versa).

For us - fairly heavy internet users but not ones to sit on YouTube for hours - 3GB seemed like not enough data, but the 10GB of data that O2 and Orange offer at £30 and £25 respectively is a bit expensive for us.

I dug a little deeper and found a 3 one-month contract offering 5GB data for £15 a month - the same price as their 3GB tariff! The catch was, you had to buy it with their MiFi device, a brilliant little gadget that receives the mobile broadband signal then sends it out as a Wi-Fi signal to devices within a 10m range - meaning James and I could connect to the internet at the same time onboard, wirelessly. Sounds great, but as it is locked to 3’s network, we would like to try the network in our home berth before committing to that. Maybe we would have to stump up for a 10GB plan after all.

A few days later, whilst visiting my parents in Guildford, I popped into the 3 Store. I asked if I could sign up to the one-month contract as ‘SIM only’ - not paying £49.99 for the MiFi unit as well. They can hardly say no to “Hello, I want to give you money!” and I walked out of the shop with my mobile broadband £15/5GB SIM card, ready to plug into the 3 dongle my granddad had previously given me.

I was very happy. I felt like I had beaten the system. But I was also very scared that the coverage might be pants, and grateful for the 14-day money back guarantee if you find out you don’t have decent coverage (make sure you purchase it from a 3 store, as Carphone Warehouse knock this down to three days). Similarly O2 give you a ‘30-Day Happiness Guarantee’.

So was the coverage any good, or did I have to take up 3’s return guarantee and opt for a different network?

Well, you can probably answer this for yourself. Have you noticed the increase in photos on our blog recently? And if you’re a Facebook friend, the increase of my photos on there?

It’s bloody brilliant.

But now I feel bad.

3 have found their loophole, and no longer offer 5GB for £15. But be cheeky: phone them up and say something along the lines of:

“Hello, I want to give you £15 a month.”

“Really, madam? OK… so which phone would you like?”

“Oh, I don’t want a phone. I would like to sign up to your excellent mobile broadband package that I have heard rave reviews about. But I would like the same offer that my friend received only a matter of weeks ago.”

“What was that, madam? I’m sure we can give you a good deal.”

“She is on a one-month mobile broadband contract and receives 5GB of data for £15 a month.”

“I’m sorry madam, but we don’t offer that contract anymore.”

“Well, that’s a shame. I was hoping you would live up to the brilliant things I have heard about your service from my friends, but I shall have to go back and tell them you are not as good as we all thought. I will give O2, or Orange, or Vodafone my £15 a month instead, and recommend them to my friends over you.”

“Well, I’ve very sorry, but I can’t authorise deviations from our set tariffs.”

“May I speak to your manager?”

“Certainly, madam.”

[transfers call to manager]

“Hello, how may I help?”

“Ah yes, hello. I was just trying to give your company £15 a month, for the same service my friend receives and recommended to me, but your colleague refused to take my money and instead I shall have to go to another network.”

“I’m sure that’s not the case, madam. Let me see what I can do for you…”

And you put the phone down £15 a month lighter, 5GB a month heavier. Go on, try it, it’ll be fun and they’d be crazy to say no.

P.S. If they do say no, I’d go for Orange’s 12-month contract at £18/month for 3GB data - yes, £3 more, but you’re allowed unlimited data usage between 00:00 and 09:00. This is perfect for leaving your laptop to download, err, programs from BBC iPlayer overnight without eating into your data. The dongle is free.

It was amazing when James took the pump apart; Lavacs are really simple, and just use a normal Henderson bilge pump, unlike Jabsco’s offerings which are all complicated and full of parts and break far more regularly, especially if you liveaboard. We had done no maintenance to our Lavac ever since we bought Milestone, which was a little over a year ago. In hindsight, that was probably a bad idea…

The pump was TOTALLY caked up with scummy bits, so poor James spent his Christmas Eve with the pump in parts in a bucket, trying to chip off all of the crap that had solidified inside the pump. The outlet hose was another matter: I have no idea how even wee wee made it down that thing! It was completely chocka. We needed a service kit and new outlet hose to get this thing back in action.

Luckily we spent the rest of Christmas away with family so we didn’t think about the toilet too much. But when we returned back to Miley, in this freezing cold weather, out came the bucket - the solid plastic one was already in use, full of brown water and pump bits, so we had to resort to the foldaway pink bucket… that’s right, I couldn’t even sit down on the bucket.

It took a few more evenings of James’ hard work, a service kit and entirely new outlet hosing to see it fixed. One evening was particularly poignant: James had managed to literally cover himself in skanky brown water/bits of poo when a pipe jumped off a fitting with a bit of a bite to it. I had to help him strip down to his boxers, in which he remained to work on it further. I couldn’t take any more (the smell was lethal) so I walked up to the marina facilities and read a bit of All At Sea. A while later James appeared in an old t-shirt and swimming trunks - all he could get his contaminated hands on, bless him. It was the beginning of the cold spell, with frost on the ground and a chill in the air, and here was the dockmaster, off duty, walking up to the facilities in nothing but a t-shirt and shorts. He later told me that he walked past a couple of bertholders on the way up, who did more than one double take, looked at him oddly and carried on walking. I felt so, so terrible for him.

Two nights ago James finally cracked it: we now have a working toilet. I still can’t actually believe it, and have to stop myself reaching for the bucket in the cockpit. It’s an amazing feeling to actually appreciate having a toilet. Sure, we’ve all found ourselves thanking God when we’re in the cinema busting for a pee and finally the film ends and we run to the toilets. But this is different. It’s truely refreshing. I have taken toilets granted for my entire life… but now, I really do appreciate them. I have respect for them. And I’m definitely not going to block ours.

Here’s to the toilet. And James.