winter

long time no chat !! sorry i have had alot on my plate . anyway back to the topic in hand ; it is winter , boat jobs time. this is the time when every yachtsman has mixed feelings about , firstly its the winter ,the boat is coming out and there is no more sailing for a couple of months but then it is also the time to repair, re-clean , or refit !!! (Mr B). for me it is a part of all of them. i have to repair a crack i have found in my inner lining of the cabin :( i have to re-clean the whole boat again (this time may involve some polish) and there are som aspects of refitting as well.

i went down on sunday and was very happy about getting on my boat and seeing her again !! i opened her up looked inside i was astonished at what a state i had left her in after the final sail and that had to be changed immediately!!!! and found a great deal of water in the compartment under the companion way which i wasn't surprised about after the great deal of rain we have had recently.

when i was tiding up and waiting for my father to come and give me some guidance i noticed that my port bulkhead was covered in mold and thought this was from the existing deck leak but when i looked at the top of my bulk head u discovered a crack in the inner lining of my cabin , the crack is about 3-4 inches long and has a gap of about 3-5mm between each edge. i immediately went on deck to see if there was anything on the deck but there was nothing and a big sigh of relief from me.

when father arrived he was holding a very big polishing machine ( obviously i couldn't wait to get my hands on it ) and we started to use the polisher to clean the combings and toe-rails. we weren't polishing , we were cleaning with a heavy duty cleaner. i was only able to do one side as there are boats around me and i couldn't physically get to the other sides.

after polishing and after an amazing sail on my fathers first 310 i went back to pandemonium , to do some final tiding of the weekend so it is easier to do a thorough clean of the cabin. i remembered that Paul had given me a spinnaker bag as i didn't have one , obviously it was rather over sized because of the different sizes of spinnakers. but i took it anyway because i thought i could use it for storage. then i realized if i folded all of my sails carefully i could fit them all in the same bag !!!! after that i had loads more room inside.

the final job of the day was removing my old compass and wood mounting. the wood mounting had become rotten and the compass was getting very difficult to see and which later discovered had been put on upside down !!! (not by me) .. this space will be filled with a newer compass which has been very kindly donated by a very good friend.