Julie and Craig's sailing trip

Arrived in the UK on 5th July to be greeted at the airport by Martin Bandey, the yacht broker we went through to purchase Hullabaloo.  It has to be said that Martin and his wife Liz made the whole rather stressful experience of buying a 13 year old boat unseen using e-mail only an enjoyable process.  Martin organised all the work neccessary on the boat to be carried out before we got there effectively acting as our project manager. Martin and Liz also personally cleaned the boat for us which was a nice surprise.  Not only that they also hosted us in their house, a lovely old historic rectory in Botley in the South of England for a few days and spent a week with us driving us around to buy all the things we needed to set Hullabaloo up for us - quite amazing really and we really enjoyed their company.  The boat ended up being perfect for us and soon we had Pierre, a professional French skipper on board to help us on our first Journey to La Rochelle in France.  After a delay of a week due to weather we departed for France with Pierre and also Dave Webster, a close friend from school days working in Dubai who came over to give us a hand.