I’d say there’s a direct link between climate change and wet sleeping bags last week on Guiding Star. Weeks of heatwave opened up decks seams all over the boat and when the weather broke with a storm at the end of July while we were in Douarnenez, the rain poured in.

Back in Plymouth, we spent a day working on seams. Iga and Celia put masking tape on the worst seams, which seemed to cover about a third of the boat. Inspired by Tim on Alert, I put aluminium foil over the cooker and boiled the pitch in the galley to fill up the seams. Iga mastered the big soldering iron to melt the old pitch into the new and smooth the seams.

There’s still a long way to go. We didn’t have a caulking iron to harden down the seams before adding new pitch; that’s on order. But we made a start.