Back on the boat

The kids all seemed to have enjoyed their long night out clubbing in London. They were reasonably quiet sneaking back into the apartment just after 5am. By pre arrangement we woke them all up at 10am so we could sort ourselves out and vacate by 11am. We then had a late breakfast all together.

Then it was the hard bit. We’d already said goodbye to John the previous day. Now it was time to say goodbye to Ben, Sam & Amy. I’ve said it before but this is the tough end of our wonderful life. The price we pay for our adventures is the time away from family. It’s hard to say goodbye.

We took the London Underground back to Betty’s. It was a bit complicated as there were a lot of lines out of action due to weekend maintenance. Fortunately we still caught a fast train into Chesham which kept us sane.

We stayed a few hours with Betty sorting out our final packing before Betty and Paul took us to the airport (more goodbyes, this time to Emily & David).

At the airport a new set of trials began. At the check in we ran into two problems. The first we were overweight. We thought we could have two bags each with each weighing up to 20kg. Turns out we could check in any number of bags with a total personal limit of 20kg. We were 17kg over with an excess fee of nearly £20 per kilo. Ouch. They did recommend putting as much as we could into our hand luggage and did give us an extra 3 kilo each.

While Helen got busy redistributing mass I dealt with our second problem which was to do with having only one way tickets into New Zealand. The airline didn’t recognise our boat documentation demonstrating we’d sailed into New Zealand and were going to sail out again. It ended up being resolved by calling New Zealand immigration and explaining everything. They then gave the airline the blessing.

We rechecked our main bags and were given the all clear (I think they were being over generous). We couldn’t get our boarding passes there (due to the second problem) and had to go back to another desk to get our passes.

Lugging our now extremely heavy hand luggage we cleared through security. Although that didn’t turn out so easy as my computer back now stuffed full of extra cables, antennae, AIS boxes and a hard drive had to be manually searched. The side line for the manual search took well over 30 minutes to get to my bag. We’d arrived early so we’d have had to wait somewhere. Just hadn’t planned on hanging around security.

We got through eventually and were soon on our flight to Seoul. On this flight we ended up with four center seats between the two of us. The middle armrests wouldn’t rise. Helen had enough room to lie down but I didn’t really. Helen got a fair amount of sleep and I got some.

At Seoul we had to get off the plane and go to gate 28. Gate 28 was where we got off. Only we had to lug our extremely heavy hand luggage down through the terminal, through some more security checks, up a floor and back to the gate, a floor higher than earlier. We were soon back on the same plane, almost back in the same seats for the trip to Auckland. Sleeping was next to impossible for us on this flight so we arrived feeling a little worse for wear.

To cut the rest of the story short, we got back to the boat ok via a provisioning stop in Whangarei. Our parts for the conversion have arrived but the techs haven’t. My house battery water (I’m down to 4 batteries at the moment) has boiled off too much so this needs to be resolved quickly.

For now the game for today is to get the essential paperwork done and simply try and stay awake until early evening.