WILL OUR MOORING HOLD UP?! [AND we have had 19 kittens on the boat😮]

It's been a few months since putting out our last video - the result of a bit of Covid depression mixed with the fact that the boat has been a very busy place over the past few months, with 19 foster kittens moving through the boat since early January!! It's been awesome but time consuming and very distracting from the importance of boat work and creating videos.😉 Now that it's May, and the beginning of winter here in South Africa, we are bracing ourselves for winter. We made it through last winter, thinking for sure, that it would be our last in SA, but with Covid - here we still sit.☹ With winter on the West coast - comes the cold fronts from across the Atlantic!! So there will be periods of crazy wind, rain and cold. A question in the forefront of our minds has been [Will our mooring hold up!!!!] Being permanently on a mooring ball now and no longer in the relative safety of a marina, mooring ball safety has been forefront in our minds. Saldanha Bay Yacht Club has a really good bi-annual mooring inspection program which is great and puts our minds at ease. Whilst nothing ensures total safety, this has made us more confident that we will hold up ok in the coming months. Over the past few months, we were lucky enough to see new mooring systems being made up and placed in the bay, as well as get to see the actual maintenance process carried out. We figured this would make for an interesting video topic as so many sailors, world wide, rely on entrusting their boat homes to the safety of mooring balls/buoys. We will show what makes up the mooring system, and have some underwater footage of the maintenance of hugely overgrown lines. Even with the biannual maintenance program, the maintenance company says that they have seen a vast increase in growth on the lines over the past year and even different types of growth, so as we know already, marine conditions are ever changing and if these safety checks and maintenance are not carried out regularly, we really will be at the mercy of the elements when these crazy storms or squalls blow through. We realise that the ultimate responsibly is for all sailors to dive on their moorings themselves, to further ensure that they are in good condition, but it is reassuring to know that this program is in place here at Saldanha Bay Yacht Club. As I mentioned before - we have had a boat load😉 of kittens pass through our boat home. Around Christmas I realised our souls needed some animal therapy, so approached to Langebaan Animal Care about fostering - obviously on a yacht this was going to be difficult and safety would be a huge concern. I was totally upfront about the fact that we were on a yacht, gave them some info on my previous animal rescue work and just put it out there that we could foster some kittens if they needed help. I figured that with kittens, they are small and litter box train from a very young age. initially I thought we'd only foster through the bottle feeding stage and then they could move on to land foster homes when they started moving around more. Well, after the first litter came through we were hooked and put a safety system in place to ensure that they were always safe and unable to get out of the yacht at any time and we have been able to keep almost all of them until they were 8 weeks old. At 8 weeks they are advertised through Langebaan Animal Care, home checks are done and they have all been successfully homed. I'm a bit of a pushy foster mom😜and have managed to stay in touch with a few of the families that took my kittens. Its just so great to see them developing and happy. At the time this video goes out, we only have 2 little gingers left about to go to their new homes and we have decided to take a break from fostering for a while. Apart from the fact that it is now getting really cold on the yacht, we also need to get back to applying ourselves to boat work fulltime again.