Crickey, it starts to get real when the drawings turn up!  The hull construction for Coco, our beautiful Swan 54 is about to start.  I’m pretty stoked that we got to this point, especially after being out sailing last week in a chartered 32 foot Bavaria; we had a 30 – 35 knot easterly with 2 – 3 metres of swell.  I was somewhat concerned that my crew (read wife) was going to toss her toys and cancel the order for the Swan!  Next time I better check the weather forecast with a little more attention to detail perhaps?  But to be fair, it was wrong anyway…

Back to more important matters, that minor blip aside.  We’ve made a lot of the decisions around rig set-up; we are going with a Seldén carbon mast and carbon V-boom; no self furling at this stage but we can put an in-boom furl on later if we need to.  It’s light, stiff and will really get Coco cranking.  And let’s be honest, carbon is just sexy.  That coupled with around 150 sqm of sail area, this yacht will be no slug!

We are done on all the nav equipment, we’ve gone for B&G Zeus³ chartplotters with 9′ displays at each of the helms and a larger 16″ screen at the chart table (turning out to be really bloody expensive having fading eyesight). Its pretty groovy this stuff – B&G have a function called “ForwardScan” sonar support for safer passage through shallow waters.  I’m reasonably sure that feature is going to be super useful when racing for the cold beer at the yacht-club beach bar on some random tropical island.  Safety first!

Now back to waiting, waiting, waiting.  It seems like a long time right now until we take delivery in October.  We do have a factory visit planned to the Nautor yard in Finland sometime in August to sign-off and get her shipped down into the South Pacific. Maybe we should sail her back?  Swan did send us a nice calendar though, that was thoughtful…