Hi from here in victoria.  One week tommorrow we start sailing!!!! Wow so soon and so much to do.  Things are steadily progressing and slowly we are becoming to look more like a sail boat.  The crane came last week and placed all the rest of the big spars on. The Swift is a square topsail rig so the crane placed the yards which are the big horizontal spars close to the top of the mast.  I have been doing lots of lashing this past week, useing miles of marlin- Tying down all of the lines from rig tightening, lashing sails on, and putting pin rails in place.  All the cracks in my hands are a nice black color from the tar that is imbeded in the line.A lashing for the tension rigging

The Jib and Jib Topsail all lashed one and rigged

 Also working in bits of time to work on planning for cooking- menu plans and grocery lists made up for the next couple of weeks and starting to think about getting all the galley stuff on the boat.    Everyone else is busy too rigging all the running rigging for the boat involves stringing miles of line, oiling dories, reworking some of the leather, and all other sorts of boat maitainicy things.   The weather has been kind to us lots of sunshine and just spats of rain, although on Friday I woke up to pouring rain and it rained ALL day!!! This week has been dry but bitterly cold and windy. 
The view across the gorge from the shipyard

Outside of work life has been good and full of friends.  My mom came for two days last week and it was FABULOUS!!! so nice to see her, show her around, just hangout and have time together. Thanks for coming mom!!
Also part of living on an island is going to the beach as much as possible!!!  This is a sunshiney morning at China Beach (about 1 hour up the west coast of the island)

(all iphone pics)