The weather improves

Now that all the nasty white stuff has gone and the temperature has risen sufficiently it was time to get on with preparations for anti fouling but before that I spent most of Monday morning draining the bilges the ingress of water was a bit of a puzzle at first but I finally twigged that when I altered the gas locker drain so that it discharged directly overboard I had neglected to blank off the old skin fitting which allowed the gas locker to drain into the cockpit. This skin fitting is just above the level of the cockpit drains and was connected to the gas locker by means of a hose which ran through the void space around the gas locker, see an earlier post. There had been quite a considerable amount of snow in the cockpit and when it started to thaw the cockpit drains were probably still blocked with frozen snow so the water ran into the void space through the open skin fitting and then through into the saloon bilge but all was not lost as it gave me the opportunity to test the refurbished saloon bilge pump. In the near future I will remove the guilty skin fitting and glass over the opening.

Once the rain had stopped it was time to put on the protective stuff, dust mask, goggles, boiler suit etc and start on the old anti fouling quite a lot had been removed by the previous owner but there was still a fair bit of flaking stuff I therefore gave the whole underwater area a good going over with the tungsten carbide scraper anything which survived this will be allowed to remain. I spent most of Wednesday and this morning on the job finally finishing about lunchtime by giving the whole underwater area a good wash down with a stainless steel scrubbing pad. The previous owner had stripped the cast iron keel which will need a coat of rust treatment and primer before the anti fouling is applied.

After scraping the old anti fouling

After lunch the rain returned which brought a halt to further outside work there is still a bit of fairing to do on the underwater area particularly at the hull keel joint I think that originally the keel flange was a little proud of the hull and fairing filler had been applied some of which requires making good in places the weather forecast is looking reasonably favourable for next week for epoxy work.

As it was raining I finished up the day by filling the redundant screw holes in the cable locker bulkhead before sanding and priming the bare plywood I also managed another coat of paint to the cover for the stern gland access in the aft cabin.

Over last weekend and this week I managed two coats of primer/undercoat on the locker panels for the forward cabin the plan is to get two coats of gloss white on both sides over the weekend and the coming week. Painting both sides of these items takes up quite a bit of time.

I have added the photograph of the cables through the starboard side of the saloon after spiral wrapping which I had omitted previously, they will eventually be concealed above headlining panels.