Very little happened on the boat in January and I was quite disappointed when I returned to Tunisia from my visit in Belgium. I tried to push the guys to start as we only have a limited time before we have to get Sea Otter back in the water. We have planned to start our departure out of the Mediterranean mid April. Béa has 6 weeks vacation from her contract and during that time we shall be able to sail up to the the west-north-west coast of Europe where we will spend our summer.

Anyway, Béa came down for a visit in mid February. My french is not the very best, so Béa showed that she was not at all happy with the progress which she told the yard owners in french, in a no nonsense language. Oops, all of a sudden everything started to happened and with a bit of luck things will be ready in time.

We will use an isolation material called Airflex (from a UK company called Roofing Solutions UK, website http://www.roof-solutions.co.uk/index.html , contact person Graham Reynolds) that is 8mm thick and is mainly a reflective "Astrofelt" with air bubbles and a super insulating layer in between. This 8mm (very flexible sheet) material is said to be the equivalent of 25cm Rockwool. A thing to take care of is that this material must not touch the outer GRP (the fiberglass material the boat is built with) layer, there has to be a (ideally) 2cm space in between.

On the photos you can see how we glued the battens in the ceiling to fix the panels on later. Then all the panels are up for correct fit before the final dressed panels are fixated. The last photos also show how we have "shaved" off the anti-fouling, because we applied an epoxy coating before the new anti-fouling was applied. we used International Extra Micron this time, hope it lasts better than Hempel did.