From April 2000 to April 2002

La Premiere, our home for the foreseeable future is a 1991 Beneteau First 310.  Quite a racy boat for ‘live-aboards’ as we have become, but those of you who knew Chris will understand that he just has to race virtually every other yacht in sight (even if they don’t know they are in a race!).  More seriously, we still enjoy our sailing and a lot of the more cruising oriented yachts seem to put sailing low on the list of priorities.

 Accommodation comprises our bedroom in the pointy bit, another cabin aft which we are using as a store room and houses amongst other things two bicycles, cockpit cushions, a hammock, enough paperbacks to furnish a fair sized library, tools, spare parts and our larder.  In between these two cabins is the kitchen and ‘living-room/dining-room’.  While, tucked in a corner is the bathroom.  Despite living aboard we still do not use the proper nautical terms for the rooms on the boat, this is our home after all and not a merchant or naval ship.

 We had owned La Premiere for one season before deciding to sail off and the fitting out to make living aboard a sensible proposition took about five months.  This included fitting a water-cooled refrigerator, fresh water-cooling conversion for the engine, pressurised hot water to the kitchen and bathroom, shore-power, increasing the domestic battery capacity to 200Ah, more anchors, chain and warps, renewing the standing rigging, a bimini sun-shade – there’s optimism for you, a Pack-a-Main lazy-jack system and so on . . .

 Writing this a month after moving aboard we are very pleased.  Our Eberspacher diesel fired central heating is coping well with the worst our climate can conjure and the kitchen is proving itself despite the fact that our culinary exploits have grown more adventurous since we now have time to experiment.  I do miss the dishwasher though.

 For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty here are La Premiere’s vital statistics:

 Length 31’ most of which is waterline length!  Good for speed though it means you have to be a little more careful when weighing anchor, as there is very little overhang below the stem head fitting.

Max Beam 10’, carried well aft, which has helped us accelerate past far larger yachts while off the wind.

Max Draft 6’, she has a deep fin keel with a streamlined cast iron bulb at the very bottom to provide the maximum righting moment.

Displacement 3600kg plus beer and wine.

Being a bit of a racer La Premiere carries a large rig and needs only a little wind to reach hull speed.  We believe that a big rig with large sails can always be reefed down, but a small rig can never be ‘stretched’ when winds are light.  As a result with a full main and cruising chute she will fly along in barely a whisper of wind.

The engine is a fresh-water cooled 18hp Volvo Penta 2002, which we keep so clean you could eat your lunch off it!

The fridge is an IsoTherm SP self pumping water-cooled system with a special controller that detects when the engine is running or we are connected to shore-power and stores lots of cold in a holding plate to lessen the load on the batteries.

An IsoTherm calorifier heated either by an immersion heater connected to shore-power or by engine cooling water provides the hot water.  A reservoir of salt within the calorifier with a very high specific heat capacity acts as a ‘storage heater’ and keeps the water hot far longer than a normal hot water tank relying solely on insulation.

Navigation equipment consists of a GPS, Autopilot, combined Radar/Chartplotter and other ST50 instruments all interfaced together using Raytheon’s SeaTalk interface.  The whole system seems to work very well.

Weather information is collected by a Navtex receiver and from the Internet.

From April 2002 to . . . .

Barrique, our home since April 2002 is a Beneteau First 42s7, very much a stretched version of the First 310 we had become very much at home in. The change might be compared to moving from a two-bedroom flat to a three-bedroom house. Basically it is 50% longer, 50% wider and has 50% more headroom and even a poor mathematician like me can tell you that makes the interior 337.5% bigger.

The accommodation is more spacious with her enormous rig she has, err, rather impressive performance under sail, and with her 56hp engine, good performance when the wind decides not to cooperate. At the front is the main bedroom with a full size bed! In front of this is a shower room with loo and basin with an automatic pump that empties the shower tray as you wash! In the middle of the boat is the saloon and kitchen, the kitchen is not L shaped like on La Premiere but along the left-hand side of the boat, on the other side is the dining room table with a large U shaped settee around the back and a straight settee facing away from the kitchen. This should be able to seat 6 very comfortably, eight for special occasions, to dinner. The table can sink down into the seats and an infill cushion turns the whole area into a giant 'playpen' for watching DVD's say . . . . . . or for use as an occasional double bed. Aft of the kitchen at the foot of the stairs to the left is a second bathroom with loo, shower and basin - it too sucks out the water as you shower! AND full standing headroom in both bathrooms!!! Aft of the dining/seating area at the foot of the stairs to the right is a chart table that faces forward with its own seat behind. Either side of the stairs, between the stairs and the bathroom to port and between the stairs and the chart table to starboard are doors into two spare bedrooms, both with full size beds and standing headroom (!). Under the stairs is a 4-cylinder 56hp diesel engine. Up on deck there is a large steering wheel instead of a tiller, with an electronic chart display at the wheel, the roller furling jib that winds the front sail around the forestay is electrically push-button operated (!) and there is an electric anchor chain windlass that can be operated from the bow or from the cockpit. Down below there is another electronic chart plotter (very nice big display) and a plumbed in music system with speakers below and 300W(!) speakers in the cockpit. This can all be controlled remotely from the steering wheel. There is a flashy suit of racing sails, a normal set of sails of a similar material to those on La Premiere and an enormous asymmetric spinnaker that blocks out the sky with its own cunning sock (like a giant rolling-unrolling condom (that you are allowed to use more than once :-) that makes it easier to set and lower.

All this will make it a great deal easier to live on, sail and travel in, our trips should be a little less physically demanding for our old age . . . . Oh I almost forget, there is a whacking great hydraulic autopilot too.

'Barrique' is named after a French oak barrel for ageing wine that holds 225 litres. They can be used for three years, then can be 're-bored' to reveal fresh wood, used another three years and then retired to an apartment in the Algarve, or occasionally to Portugal's Port producers who favour second-hand wine barrels for ageing their brew, it all adds to the flavour.