Last night we had a massive thunderstorm, very impressive, I sat on the bow watching the lightning, I was soaked through from the walk back from dinner, but it was so warm, that didn’t matter, what might have mattered was the rain washed off my Deet, mossy repellant. Consequently I woke up about 1 AM in quite a lot of pain, I had bites/stings all over and couldn’t sleep for a long time.
I managed to get to sleep eventually but was woken by the work on the hull, the last bit of painting happened today, the boot top, this is a line of paint that runs around the boat at the waterline. In the UK, we tend to use a special kind of paint, called unsurprisingly, boot top paint, it’s like antifoul but harder and lasts longer. They don’t do that here, eventually I settled for a blue line using ordinary antifoul, this was followed by a debate over which blue. The boats name is in Midnight Blue, appropriately, however the blue they provided was different, being colour blind, I couldn’t tell, and I don’t really care, but I have to be careful as Ive got used to buying brown clothes that turn out to actually be green. The guy painting didn’t like the colour, and wouldn’t paint it on, however he couldn’t explain this to me, and we ended up with a big pow-wow in the store room where they got a large colour chart out and we chose colours that would work, however, they only had the one colour, the one we started with, so thats what we used.
So to start the day I decided to tackle the broken seacock in the inaccessible place. I emptied out the two lazaret lockers at the stern of the boat, this gave me much better access than I had realised, however as I thought, the auto helm would have to come out, so “in for a penny…” I grabbed some spanners and started unbolting.
Pretty soon I was there, really good access and I could now see that the other seacock had rusty hose clamps, in fact they were quite useless and made me realise that I couldn’t skimp on any of these tasks.
At one point I was thinking of what I need to do to satisfy the surveyor and the insurance company, whereas now I realised, I have to satisfy myself first, and that everything needs to be 100% where it affects the boats safety.
I got to work on cleaning up the area, cut off the old hose, and got the engineer over to remove the broken seacock, he returned later saying he was going to repair the seacock, as he had unsiezed it, and would repair the handle, he considered this original bronze seacock superior to what he could provide. Which was nice. so I set about washing that part of the boat, it looks good now, and I feel very confident I won’t be having any issues there. He promised to do the prop tomorrow, as he has others ahead in the queue
And that was basically a days work for me, tomorrow the repaired sea cock will be fitted, and I can re-install the auto pilot. In theory, the yard here won’t let me do any work below the water line.
Here’s another attempt at a time lapse, embedded this time, so you don’t need to download it, however it may take time to load. Once again, they didn’t steam off, due to engine problems, see if you can spot the holes in his rudder, rust buckets, or more accurately rust spades.
Paul C.