Welcome to 2010
Well with such nice weather this leave I decided to get some of the out side of the boat sorted.
we started with the foredeck so we would have somewhere to sit out in the deck chairs. The bulwarks and deck where scrubbed with bio soap(derived from my bio-diesel production) this is great on any green mossy stuff. The worst of the loose and rusty paint was removed. The bulwarks painted with our cream gloss. The deck paint had about 10% by volume kiln dried sand added to it to make it none slip and works very well. Glossy deck paint can be dangerous, when wet or icy.
Fore deck painted.
Next we started on the starboard side (quay side), this required a bit more work. Firstly we cut out the old pipe that ran down side under the windows, as these where not original. With the pipes out of the way it was time to get the needle gun out and start de scaling the metal work This was both noisy and time consuming but it removes every thing back to clean metal so you can see any problems like cracks and holes. We only found one hole which was welded up.
The next step was to treat the metal surface with a rust inhibitor/converter (which our cat Spice managed to walk through and left little pussy prints everywhere!!) Whilst this did it’s job we sanded down the window panels, these where given a single coat of gloss. The de scaled area was then primed and given a coat of heavy duty deck paint (without sand) Eventually we intend to get the whole boat grit blasted and treated with special paint, but there’s much to do before then.
Paint job.
We then painted the hand rails, these are to be replaced in due course. The deck was then painted with the addition of sand. The boat now looks a bit more presentable. It was now getting near the end of my leave and the weather was on the change, time to do a little inside. So we made a shelf for the galley and started to put the oak timbers around the edge of the deckhead. These need be be stiff timbers to support the the deckhead frame work and stop them sagging above the windows.
Galley shelf.
The only other thing we did was to organize and oversee the removal of a very heavy Hi ab crane from another vessel close to us. The boat is in an awkward position and is to large just to move about so after much deliberation we decided to get a large crane in for the job. The problem was the Hi ab was 70 ft away from ground good enough to take the weight of the crane, still all went well and the Hi ab was removed without incident. It still took over 4 hours but its better to take your time and do it right than rushing and something goes wrong.
Crane job.
A better trip for work this time we laid the main solid
