For those interested in the boat maintenance aspects, here is a non-comprehensive list of the major tasks that kept me busy during the Winter 2010-2011:
- Scrapping-off a well-established marine ecosystem under the waterline. The neighbour’s cats were especially interested in following this part of the process.
- Sanding nearly everything I could get my hands on, except the aluminium spars. This implied unscrewing and dismantling a lot, until I started to wonder if I would ever be able to put it all together again.
- Varnishing the wooden bits with clear yacht varnish. Looks so much better than the sort of DIY-shop teak-oil that was there before.
- Stripping-out the old and mouldy decoration fabric down below.
- Decorating the cabin using marine plywood.
- Installing electrical wiring for instruments (i.e. an old depth sounder), navigation, and anchor lights.
- Painting the deck and cockpit (excluding the ant-islip). This required the application of a few nautical miles of masking tape.
- Painting the topsides with good polyurethane yacht paint.
- Covering cockpit seats and sole with diamond pattern material. Not only safer, it makes the cockpit look less like bathtub.
- Installing a new spreader bracket. This was a tricky one, since I could not find any standard that corresponded to the section of the original mast. If you have information on this, I definitely would like to hear from you.
- Building a new mast foot, that proved not to be good enough and was upgraded to a self-built mast tabernacle. (I will add a section on this at some stage.) The original mast foot practically fell to pieces on lowering the mast.
- Install navigation and anchor lights.
- Apply antifouling, waterline paint, vinyl lettering…
Along the way, there were episodes that seem entertaining now but were not at the time. Like when we first attempted to step the mast and dropped it smashing the Windex and the brand new navigation lights.
