These past days carried on without a let-up. On Tuesday: she goes back in the water; checking that there are no leaks. (Unlikely, but now, with the boat still within easy reach of being hoisted out again, is simply the right moment.) Then stepping the mast. Even though it isn’t my first time: hauling this sixteen-metre, roughly two-hundred-kilo brute aloft on the crane, setting it upright on the deck, bracing it with the shrouds so it doesn’t topple … even with Matthias the harbourmaster as the expert, and me really only doing as he says, it comes with a knot of tension every time. Then clearing the crane berth, tying up in a box – and on to tuning the rig.
On Wednesday I collect the new sixty-metre anchor chain in Kiel. On the way I stop off at the recycling centre in Eckernförde to drop off all the boatbuilding rubbish (three big sacks of it, in the end – spent paint rollers, disposable gloves, epoxy leftovers and the rest). At SVB in Kiel the anchor chain sits neatly packed in a box on a one-way pallet. How does one get a pallet of a hundred-odd kilos into a small car? I stand before the pallet. A salesman stands before the pallet. The two of us look on, baffled. A young saleswoman comes over and says she’d happily go and fetch the powered pallet truck – a sort of little walk-behind forklift – and bring it over to my car. The salesman nods. I thank her. She vanishes into the stockroom. And I wait. And wait. Fifteen minutes on, I’m waiting still. Then she appears. Were the progress not so slow, you’d have to call it hair-raising. Scarcely a shelf she doesn’t pull up just short of hitting. Backs off, corrects her line, pushes on to the next near-miss. I’ve never worked one of those pallet trucks myself. Back in my school days at the supermarket it looked exactly like this whenever we tried to push the pallet trucks the wrong way round instead of pulling them. She pushes. Smiles as she does it. Reverses again and … I can’t be sure it was only a seeming eternity, but at some point both arms of the truck were under the pallet. She’d never done it before, she said. But it made a nice change. And she’d always wanted a go on the pallet truck. We had a good laugh of it, at any rate, and eventually the pallet with its sixty metres of anchor chain was settled in the boot of my car. Thanks again, here, for the help.
From Kiel on to Schleswig, to collect the liferaft from its service. Not without a long chat with the gentleman who serviced it – once a naval aviator, and a great lover of England. He’d dearly like to sail across to England again himself one day, he says. Then back to Brodersby and, at last, on to the electrics. There’s progress, but I’m feeling these past weeks. Few breaks, little rest. I’m slowly reaching my limit. The best of it, though: on Tuesday evening I sleep aboard for the first time again. No more commuting by car in the morning. Aboard again at last, on the water. The best sleep in weeks, in the gentle heave of the boat. I unwind. In the evenings, at least, when I’m aboard and cooking, and afterwards simply thinking, reading, and looking forward to the weeks and months to come.