S/V Spindrift

After four months on the hard at Sopromar boat yard in Lagos, Portugal — where the air is a heady cocktail of fiberglass dust, diesel exhaust, and the collective ambition of a hundred half-finished projects — I spent a couple of day on S/V Spindrift to give her the full treatment and ready her for the spring: a new main navigation computer to keep us pointed in the right direction (outgoing computer had a video board failure), a shiny new propeller to actually get us there, a crash gybe preventer because surprises at sea are only fun in retrospect, a freshly rigged Elvstrøm blue water runner ready to fly downwind in the trades, and a top-to-bottom service on both the main engine and generator, because nothing focuses the mind on preventative maintenance quite like being 500 miles offshore with no one to call. The yard buzzes with angle grinders, compressors, and the occasional string of multilingual profanity, a soundtrack shared by cruisers from a dozen countries all doing the same thing — getting their boats ready for wherever the wind takes them next. Click on link here for the YouTube video.