Ray & Annette Chitty’s adventures onboard their Freeman 30 cruiser ‘Kevayling’.

History

We purchased ‘Kevayling’ in October 2007 when we decided that our former boat ‘Misty Blue’ had become to small for our requirements, or should I say the requirements of our grandchildren who appeared to be growing at an alarming rate.

Her former name, when we purchased her, was ‘Louisa D’. This was in fact the name of the former owners wife. Right from the onset we had decided that she should have a name change and a brush up on her paint work, although in very good condition generally the paint work was tired after 40 years of polishing. We were not going to rush the work and decided that we would use her as she stood for the first year and lift her out and undertake the work during the winter of 2008/09.

After a fun year Kevayling was duly lifted and work began on the tidying up but we soon realised that the windows were leaking worse than we thought and the only thing was to remove them all and re-seat them with new seals. This would mean putting her in the boat shed so that the work could be carried out before spring arrived. So what started out as a tidy up became a full blown restore job, off came the old paint, deck fittings and windows and work commenced. You can view the restoration work on the Restoration page.

New Name

Many people have asked where the name came from and I usually respond by saying it’s Celtic for fisherman. In fact Kevayling is made up from my brother-in-law’s name who sadly died just after we brought her. His name was Kevin Ayling, commonly known as Kev. He was in fact a closet sailor himself regularly taking his family to the boards for their holidays and was a keen fisherman.

In memory of Kev we simply removed the space in his name to make a new Celtic word which Kevayling carries with pride.

This site has been developed so that we can share some of the fun we have with our boat, some of the adventures we do and a record of other sailing activities that we undertake. We hope you enjoy looking through our site.