More boat bashing ...

They say that the liveaboard cruising life, to which we aspire, is in reality fixing yachts in exotic places. Well at the moment we're doing an awful lot of yacht fixing in rather less than exotic Essex!

The big job during this trip has been to get everything ready for the masts to be refitted. A key part of that job was to make up new backing plates for the mizzen mast forward shroud chain plates. To that end, I'd ordered up some A4 (marine grade) stainless steel plate of the right width and thickness and twice as long as each plate needed to be and cut it in half at home.

To my utter annoyance, I forgot to put the chain plate I'd taken home back in the van but that's not the disaster I thought it might be for reasons I'll come to below.

Usefully, I have a small pillar drill (thanks Laurins!) on the workbench in my container which, with suitable (and suitably expensive) drill bits made light work of drilling the holes in the plate.

You can see the difference in size between the new plates and the original! This should be more than sufficient to stiffen up the area of deck that is causing concern.

The starboard side plate I waa able to refit as can be seen.

I'm not showing you my efforts at glassing it in though! That was a bit of a disaster which I'll need to do some tidying up on.

On the port side, I've done all the preparation ready to fit the plate which I'll do next week.

With the masts down, it would have been crazy not to sort out the rest of the through deck fittings associated with the rig. So I'd already re-bedded the starboard side main mast chain plates, now it was the turn of those on the port side.

That meant dismantling the locker above the port saloon berth and taking the front of the cupbooard in the heads. 

Fortunately, on this side of the boat there was no need to remove the below deck element of the chain plates as we haven't had the same water ingress as you'll recal was evident on the starboard side.

So I didn't have to resort to wood butchery of the locker structure again, just get the nuts off and remove the deck fittings.

Once they were off, the wisdom of doing the job was very evident. What sealant had orginally been used 44 years ago (not a lot by the look of it!) was dried out and perished. You really don't want water getting into the deck around these fittings as the deck in this area is two layers of GRP with a balsa wood core. If water gets into that core, it rots out and you get spongey decks and a big repair problem. We haven't got that far yet and now we won't!

The sander came out for a play to sand down the deck paint and old sealant to give a clean flat surface. Then a good dollop of marine grade sealant (but not Sikaflex for those in the know, Sika 295 is actually an adhesive and not what you want to use here 'cos you might need to remove the fittings again some time) and everything could be reinstalled and bolted up good and tight. 

With that done, bar the one chain plate to be fitted next week, we were ready to have the masts refitted and it just so happend that I got a message from Dave the Rigger to say he could install the new rigging on Monday and be around if I could get the crane booked next week. The crane was duly booked for Wednesday so that's hopefully all happening next week (the one wrinkle is that as of today there is a thunderstorm alert for Wednesday so we'll see what happens)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there was a whole lot of other jobs to be tackled. 

With help from my mate Tony, we'd run a new cable the length of the main mast for the VHF antenna.

 I'd installed the Rolls Royce of marine VHF antennas, the superb Metz Manta, but the VSWR (the main measure of the effectiveness of an antenna installation, I won't bore you with the technicalities) was rather poor.

The standard cable universally used for the job is called RG58 and it's rather thin stuff and really not suitable for cable runs over 10m at the most. As our mast is over 11m high and then there's the cable from the mast foot to the navigation table where the radio is installed, that's getting on for 15m!

The ideal cable to use would be stuff called RG213 which is very low loss but it's pretty thick and inflexible stuff. Given that the cable needs to exit the mast through the side, trying to get RG213 around that bend would be a right faff and potentially even impossible. The next best choice would be RG8 but that's nearly as thick and only slightly more flexible. Salvation is at hand though in the form of RG8X cable which is only a little thicker than RG58, nearly as flexible but has about half the loss per metre.

So that's what we've used! And boy did it need doing! The existing cable was badly corroded internally and the outer sheath was falling apart. With a new cable run below decks (when I get a round tuit) we should have significantly better transmission and reception on the VHF set which is, of course, a vital safety item.

With all the things that HAD to be done, done, I've been pottering around, when the heat permitted, on whatever job from the lengthy to do list took my fancy. I shan't bore you with all the details, it's all been odd jobs that could be done in an hour or two rather than anything epic.

So tomorrow I shall be running Jane home as she has to be back at work on Monday and then I'll be back down for a few more days by the end of which we'll hopefully have a fully rigged sailing yacht again. We should now be able to sort out insurance and in the hope and expectation that this will be the case, we've booked for Pagan to be launched on the 9th of September when we're back down for our final fortnight of the "season".

She'll only be in the water for a few weeks which may seem a bit pointless but there's method in our madness. Apart from the contractual issues (we've been ashore for nigh on four years on a berthing contract that only permits six months ashore per annum!) which to be absolutely fair and clear the marina have been very good about, the last thing we want to do is launch next spring and find we've got a show stopping problem that means we've got to immediately haul back out again.

With Pagan having now sat ashore for so long, we simply don't know whether the engine will even start and if it does start will it run OK? Are all the systems working? Is everything water tight? And so on.

Splashing her for a couple or three weeks gives us the opportunity to test everything and find out what still works and what doesn't. Hopefully then come the spring we'll actually be able to get some sailing in!