The way to San Jose?
I spent an inordinate amount of time rushing round buying things. It's astonishing what a range of bits and bobs I decided I needed for a trip I had intended to keep simple. I might be a luddite, but I did want some safety gear (and some of my potential crewmembers insisted on it) so I found a secondhand liferaft advertised by a chap on the internet, and ordered a VHF radio and flares for emergency use. I bought four lifejackets at a stall at a boat jumble, from which I also came away laden with a spare anchor, the new loo, a couple of small fenders, and a 200m coil of rope (just one careful lady owner). Somehow I begged, scrounged or hunted down the obscure supplies that an old wooden boat must have - rolls of caulking cotton, pots of toxic red lead and white lead for stopping seams above and below the waterline, linseed oil, a bale of tarred marline smelling strongly of Lapsang Souchong.
We took Rachel's car to the Maldon Tesco and loaded it to the gunwale with muesli, pasta, noodles and rice. At a nearby garage we found one of the few remaining blue paraffin pumps in the country, and topped up our containers for the stove and the Tilley lamp. Paint we got from the local chandlery, and from Andy Challis, a friend who worked nearby on a converted lightship, and had great vats of the stuff. 'Any colour as long as it's red, black or cream' he said. I opted for cream.
Wood for the repair to the stem was one of the hardest items to find. It had to be oak; it had to be big enough; it had to have exactly the same sweep in the grain as the curve in Teals forefoot. I hunted everywhere for that piece of oak, eyeing enviously every oak tree I passed with a suitably curved bough and wondering if anyone would notice if I returned at dead of night with an axe. Better to find a seasoned piece however. But no-one except wooden boatbuilders wants curved wood, so every time a tree is cut down the wonky bits get chopped up for firewood. After days of fruitless searching further afield, I ironically found a piece in a pile of offcuts in the boatyard, less than 100 yards from where Teal was lying. I had dismissed the pile before, as all the bits of wood were just a fraction too narrow. But this particular piece was perfect in every other way, and had a beautiful sweep to the grain. I slipped Jim a few quid for it and glued a couple of shims onto the sides to make it fit. The boatyard was a mine of other useful material too. The new mizzen boom and bumpkin, and sole boards for the cabin floor were made from planks from the firewood pile, the chainplates from a lump of discarded angle iron. The new bulkhead I installed behind the heads was rescued from the yard bonfire shortly before it was lit.
We needed a million mundane items. A bucket. A washing up brush. A torch. Mugs, bowls, plates, cutlery. We needed navigation equipment, but Peter kindly lent me Juanita's old Walker log and hand-bearing compass, and Catherine loaned me a Breton plotter. It disintegrated by the time I reached Finland - courses were then plotted more by guesswork than careful measuring. No ship should leave port without a barometer and a chronometer... although I never did get round to buying either of those, so maybe they weren't so important after all.
Lastly we needed charts. I had been dreading buying charts. To cover in full detail every coast we might be travelling to we would have to buy between 100 and 200 charts. New, they cost nearly £20 each. It would be easy to spend nearly as much on charts as I had on buying the boat. I couldn't afford to subsidise the Hydrographic Office to that extent.
I was saved by the chandlery at nearby Hatfield Peverel. I had already been there several times to hunt down odd deck fittings and blocks that I needed, for behind the main shop was a marvellous Aladdins cave of second-hand nautical bits and bobs. In a corner, stacked a thousand deep, was a pile of old charts discarded by a chart agent, every single one stamped 'Cancelled - not to be used for navigation' in big red letters. But most of them weren't more than a couple of years out of date. I started hunting through them for any that might be useful, and soon had a pile growing on the floor beside me. 'Hey - make me an offer for the lot' suggested the shopkeeper trying to squeeze past me. So I did, and Julians poor little Rover had to make two trips, suspension groaning under the weight, to transport the pile back to Maldon.
On a sunny day we sat in the park next to the boatyard and divided them into charts that might be useful, and charts that wouldn't. Iceland - probably not. Sumatra - no, unlikely to make our landfall there unless I had glued those magnets back in the compass the wrong way. How the heck did you pronounce Uusikaupunki, and where on earth was it? It turned out to be a Finnish port, so we added it to the 'useful' pile.
We didn't get every chart we needed, but we did get an astonishing number. Enough to see us across the North Sea, with adequate cover for any direction we might accidentally get blown. We had good coverage of the Danish islands, and reasonable for much of the Swedish coast. When we got to the intricate navigation around the Swedish and Finnish islands we would need to buy local charts, but I didn't doubt that they would be worth the investment anyway.
Julian took away the 1500-odd unwanted charts, and stowed them under his bed for a year. Eventually he sold them to a man who made his living selling cancelled charts. It takes all sorts. The one that showed the way to San Jose accidentally went with them. I just wish I'd kept it out. One day someone is bound to ask me.