After fiddling around with the steering system, the next day was redoing the bottom paint. Bottom paint is a certain type that contains copper, and is designed to stop marine life attaching itself to the bottom of your boat, slowing down the speed. It’s amazing how fast stuff grows without this paint. Unfortunately, it’s really nasty stuff, meaning that you have to SUIT UP to tackle it.

Luckily I’d done a full strip -> repaint two years ago, and was using the same brand of paint as before. Meaning that I only had to lightly wet sand the existing paint, just to rough it up a bit, after Emma taped off the waterline,.

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There is me, looking thrilled, covered in crud.

After the wet sanding, we waited for the hull to dry and then started painting! The new colour was green, because they had run out of black in the shop the different colour would help me tell when the paint needed changing as the black would show through. Application was just done with a straight roller, no ‘tipping’ with a brush required. Emma turned out to be REALLY GOOD at painting, better than me

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Between the two of us, we had the first coat on pretty quick

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Then we put on the second coat once the first had dried. Once THAT had dried, the yard guys moved the stands so we could paint under them. At this point I realised I had a huge glob of toxic green paint on the side of my head, despite being covered head to toe. No idea how THAT got there.

The final result

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Not bad for a first attempt! Though i liked the black better. Sigh.

The next day, Emma took the car back to Victoria and I got plopped in the water and set off for home. I was pretty nervous, as I had completely dismantled and reassembled the steering and here I was going 4 hours home, by myself. I had visions of everything just collapsing and me drifting helplessly into a ferry or a whale or something.

Luckily it was a lovely day

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And the sun was setting as I came into Victoria

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No failures.

So what was the result? The steering felt a LOT tighter, probably as a result of me tightening up the cables and she held course a lot easier when I let go of the wheel. As for fixing the leaker rudder – well there seemed to be a lot less water coming in underway – though hard to tell as I forgot to flush the bilge before leaving. I’ll have to do a proper check next time I am out with someone else steering, so I can get under the rudder floor and check the stuffing box and hose.

Total time out the water – 3 nights. Went up Saturday, back Tuesday. Bonus! The guy next to me in the boatyard was giving me a bit of a hard time about the state of my gelcoat, so maybe it’s time to look at fixing that. Huge thanks to Emma, without whose help I would have taken a lot longer to get things done.

 

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