I started this week by taking off the sails and the spray hood ready for lifting out on Wednesday, as I had an appointment with the coronary rehab team on Wednesday the plan was to move the boat round to the lift out berth on Tuesday afternoon. Once the berth was clear I fired up the engine and tried to get the stern to swing to starboard using the prop walk, however there was quite a stiff southerly blowing which was causing the stern to swing to port and the prop walk would not overcome this. I think that the problem is that New Morning only has a 12"x7" propeller as the engine has a 1:1 gearbox great for reducing the drag when sailing but just when prop walk might be useful its not there. In the end I had to go down the creek to a wider part and turn round, travel half a mile to cover 50 yards. I went over to Conyer today to find New Morning lifted out, pressure washed and sitting in a cradle so I got on with cleaning and stowing the fenders and stowing the mooring lines before conducting an inspection of the hull below the waterline, the first time I had seen it in over two years, it all looked pretty good apart from the brown east coast mud deposits which are like concrete. The keel looks good with no rust showing, it had a good dose of rust converter and two coats of underwater primer before anti fouling.
Friday 23 October 2020
Lift out
Friday 16 October 2020
Went sailing today
I started this week by having another look at the wind instruments, I checked the continuity of the cables as far as the connection box in the heads, there seems to be no problem up to this point it looks as though the problem is either in the mast or at the masthead but I am not taking it down just for that. I finished sanding the forward cabin sole it is just needing the final coat of flocoat. With the lift out programmed for next Wednesday I decided to go for a final sail, with a Northerly 2 or 3 it was not too bad although some sunshine would have been been welcome.
Friday 9 October 2020
Short post this week
I have done a little more sanding to the forward cabin sole however I am suffering from a bit of a low boredom threshold with sanding so I decided to fix an outstanding issue with the engine stop cable. Before I got the engine running I had replaced the original engine stop cable with a new one, the original cable was a bowden cable and it was getting pretty frayed, the new one is a solid Morse type cable but it did not have the usual ferrule at the end of the outer sheath and while the engine stop function worked perfectly well but when pushing the knob back in to reset the stop all that happened was that the outer sheath moved so the stop lever had to be reset by hand before restarting the engine, this all worked OK in fact it was probably a good way of immobilising the engine provided that you remembered to do the reset. On further investigation I found that the stop lever return spring was too long so that even in the stop position there was insufficient tension in the spring to return the lever. I started by removing the spring and cutting about three-quarters of an inch off it before forming a new eye on the end. Replacing the spring was a bit tricky as it is behind the fuel rack return spring but after some perseverance I managed to refit it.
Friday 2 October 2020
Back to sanding
Not a lot to write about this week I am afraid I was hoping that I would be able to get out into the Swale for a couple of hours at least once this week but the weather has been atrocious on the days that I had available such is life. The first task this week was to finish applying the varnish to the the shelf etc for the bookshelf behind the dinette seat back.