Weyhay!  We have the mast back in again.  Delighted with the new Petersen rigging – sleek and shiny, a great improvement on the odd assortment of fittings we had before.  Spent an enjoyable, if cold, morning tweaking until the mast rake, tension and bend seemed about right.  The wire normally used for yacht rigging needs to be stretched to 10-15% of its breaking load to provide stability against sudden loading and to prevent the mast sagging to leeward in gusts.  We found out with the Moody just how much better behaved this makes a boat in a blow.  Ventata’s rig is more complicated – an extra set of shrouds and the spreaders are swept backwards which means the fore-aft and side-side trim are not independent.  But we are getting more experienced with it and are pretty happy with the set up.  Next step is to try it out under sail to make sure it stays straight and under tension under load.

It has been hard work, but the list of jobs is finally getting shorter rather than longer and there is a growing number of things that work.  We now get better internet reception on board than at home!  Apparently Vodaphone gives the best coastal coverage, so we need a new data provider (and a bigger monthly allowance).  We are starting to ship stuff to the boat that we want to have with us, and bring back stuff we don’t.  The interior is not exactly ship shape but at least the aft cabin is now full of sails rather than tools.  Still a bit to do but we are working towards a shakedown trip next weekend.

Finally, in a promising discovery that provides added incentive to make it to Scotland – tinned pears go surprisingly well with a glass of Scotch…

Great excitement last week, with the first proof of the solar panel charging. It is hard to explain why the sight of +2A on the battery monitor could be so pleasing. Possibly the expectation, from years of experience, that plugging in a new input and removing the protective cardboard would be followed by 2 days of chasing faults around the boat with a voltmeter. But no, on a sunny day it appears we can power the fridge! In daytime at least. Normally milk glued to the bottom of the bottle is associated with accidental yohurt-making.  But in this case it was frozen. Must sort the thermostat out…

Alex is pleased with the deck. The hot weather last week was the perfect opportunity to clean and seal the teak.  Take it from me it’s a lof of cleaning: a basic thorough clean followed by teak cleaner, teak restorer and 2 coats of sealer.  My hands have only just recovered!  Fortunately, you can only do once in a while as it is aggressive on the deck as well as your hands. So I can take it easy for the rest of the year.

The new standing rigging has arrived! It is sitting, coiled and shiny, in the back of the car and tomorrow we will fit it to the mast. As ever, it has been weeks since we took it all apart so the hope is that you can find all the right bits and put them together in the right order. “Interesting” that we have to fit the fitting that secures the base of the forestay ourselves. The forestay is supplied as wire cut slightly over length so it can be fed back down the tube that the genoa is furled around.  We have to cut it to length and make up the fitting that will hold the whole mast up.  Unlike all the other wires, there is no redundancy for this one – if it fails under load, we loose the mast. No pressure then. Still debating whether to shorten it a little. The rig has a lot of rake and bend – much more than recommended as an upper limit by my rigging handbook. Taking 50mm off the length moves the top of the mast forward by around 160mm. But she sails well so presumably it is supposed to look like that?

It can be difficult to know when to trust your  judgement. The locker under the forecabin had an air vent set in.  Badly done, didn’t look original. To me it looks like the bulkhead extends above the waterline and would protect you from a hole in the bows. Why would you cut a hole in that?  Maybe something to do with ventilation for the battery for the horrible bowthruster? We filled it in, anyway, it felt like the right thing to do…

Your call is important to us.  Queue annoying music interrupted periodically by unhelpful messages.

Hmm.  Not important enough to man the call centre sufficiently to prevent long queues.  We spent the entire morning on the ‘phone earlier in the week, dealing with banks, insurance, milk deliveries, eta of the new rigging, etc. etc..

Inexplicably, the car insurance people could not comprehend our wish to insure both cars while declaring them off the road for tax purposes.  The conversation looped:

“You need to contact the DVLA, I’ll cancel your policy”

“I understand I need to deal with the DVLA about tax. (That is easy.)  I want to maintain the insurance”

“OK”

“You can confirm that the cars will still be insured when they are not taxed?”

“No, I will cancel your policy”

“I want to keep the policy.  The cars might be stolen or the garage might burn down even though we are not driving them and they are therefore not taxed.”

“You need to contact the DVLA, I’ll cancel your policy”

And so it continued for 20 minutes.  As the charging structure of our phone / broadband / tv contract is a mystery that runs close second to pricing of rail tickets, I have no idea whether to be annoyed about the cost of the call, or just the time it takes to get nowhere.  Fortunately, if you phone the same company masquerading as a new customer you get to speak with someone with that is able to help you with (it turns out) a straightforward enquiry.

The only organisation to come out with any degree of credit this week was first direct.  Ever reliable, the ‘phone is answered on first ring, by a human, with an accent you can understand, who understands your problem and can almost always sort it out.  Wouldn’t bank with anyone else.  Maybe they do car insurance?

Antifouling on, we are back in the water, in the drizzle, on a grey April day.  Nice to be able to hose the decks off – the boat yard is sludgy and gritty underfoot and doesn’t drain well, so it is hard to avoid bringing dirt on board and harder to get rid of it when you have.  We hoped that without a mast to offer convenient perching, we might be less vulnerable to nuisance birds.  Wrong again!  Who needs masts when you have overhanging trees?  The pigeons sit there biting off new shoots and dropping them (and other deposits) everywhere.  The joys of wildlife…

 

 

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Following on from last meetings at work, and the last day at work, could this week have seen our last night at Medway M2 services?  As you can’t stay on board with the boat in the yard, we have become quite attached to the place over the last couple of months.  It is the cheapest local accommodation and always available: £46/night and 30 minutes notice buys an acceptable room, unmemorable artwork, invariably cheerful Travelodge staff and a decent discount at Burger King.   Saturday nights of late have come down to a choice of Whopper meal vs Chicken Royale (~60/40 to the Whopper even though Alex doesn’t like the tomato) and whether, after working on the boat all day, we had enough energy to have a shower first.  If you are lucky you get a rear facing room and wake up to woodland views and bird song.  If not, you get the lorry park and noise of running engines.  We have been averagely lucky.

We may not have seen the last of the M2 services as there are new oil deposits under the engine and all round the gaiter that makes the seal between the drive leg and the hull.  Gearbox oil?  Engine oil?  Hard to tell.  They are both new and clean, and it could be either based on where the stuff has ended up.  An oil leak on the drive leg was the main reason we had the thing overhauled in the first place, so it’s going to be a problem if that problem isn’t sorted.  However, a pressure test suggested the new seals are OK, and the engine didn’t loose any oil last year, so we may just be seeing the aftereffect of old stuff that had got into the bell housing at the end of the engine.  Fingers crossed.  If we’re wrong, we won’t be in the water for all that long and there will be another cranage bill on its way…

In good news, Ventata isn’t leaking so we must have done a decent job reinstalling that drive leg – it sits in a very big hole below the waterline!  So, back in the water, we are enjoying cleaning the deck (much easier without all that rigging about) and have fitted a solar panel.  Together with an up-rated alternator, this should improve our power budget when away from marinas (and the humiliation of needing to plug a sailing yacht into the mains because you are too soft to live without a fridge and a chartplotter).  We had a quiet moment of satisfaction that engine started first time and the up-rated alternator does indeed charge the batteries.  If this sounds trivial, check out the notes below for making sure we put back the things we took apart and consider the disconcerting nature of having to remake the wiring (to take the higher current and because the old stuff has the wrong connectors) and, worse, of having bolts left over afterwards.

The downside of not sleeping in a Travelodge is that you need to remember towels.  We forgot and have been using tea towels to dry off with after showers for the last 2 days.  The life of luxury yachting eh?

To all our colleagues, at TRL and wider afield, for your many good wishes and gifts.  It feels very strange not to be coming back to the office tomorrow.  Richard A and Dave G we would particularly like to thank for your kind words, so much appreciated.  Looking forward to the champagne!  Also to learning to fish – thanks Matt – an inspired present.

The mast is out and Ventata seems bare without her rig!  The marina staff thankfully made a good job of taping over the hole in the deck; even with all that rain it hasn’t leaked a drop.  We weren’t really expecting them to leave the boom inside the boat.  Good for security but rather an obstacle in the saloon – making tea has become rather an acrobatic feat so I don’t think it will be staying there.

Seeing the mast on the floor gave me a renewed sense of the scale of this boat.  The size and weight can be frightening.  The longest room in our house is 19’; at over 16 metres the mast is about three times the length.  It’s heavy, and complicated: nav lights, anchor light, steaming light, deck light, wind instruments, vhf antenna, radar dome.  An unidentified aerial – the cable we labelled Coax1 inside the boat last week goes to a flimsy piece of wire at the top of the mast that does… who knows what?!  We have 2 sets of spreaders, 4 pairs of shrouds, a forestay and split backstay holding the mast up, each one something of an effort to handle.  Halyards for the mainsail, genoa, spinnaker (x2) and spinnaker pole (x2), and that’s not counting the ropes associated with the boom.

Lots of stuff; everything with its own function and, on a 1994 boat, potential for failure.  Visual inspection isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of condition (does that sound familiar?), and there’s never a good time for it to go wrong.