Cockpit gratings - the saga continues ...

This is turning out to be a much more time consuming project than I hoped. Oh well, fortunately time is not money! Not much happened with the project over the winter, for a whole raft of reasons I won't bore you with but I finally got back into it a few weeks ago

The first stage was a whole lot of ripping down planks and cutting them to rough length on the table saw and the mitre saw.

One of the distractions that kept me busy elsewhere was a major excercise clearing the venerable parent's garage which was all but unusable due to decades of accumulated junk. The upside of that being that I could move my table saw and mitre saw in there temporarily which gave me more space to work with the full size planks.

Once the main cuts had been done, it was back to my shed to do the final ripping of the grating rails.

So I ended up with a whole lot of sticks 😁 which I laid out on the bench to check I had all the right parts in all the right places.

Now way back last summer, my brother and I invested quite a lot of time and a very modest amount of money building a router table and jigs in order to cut the halving joints (of which there are a LOT!) quickly, easily and accurately.

You may recall that back then I knocked up a test grating out of pine using that setup and it worked very well.

Sadly, when I dug it out to use it for real I ran into a whole lot of problems. Firstly, the MDF base, despite being a> MDF, b> stored flat on a flat surface and c> stored in a dry shed, had warped in both planes. MDF should not warp! That's kinda the point of the otherwise cursed stuff (I hate working with MDF). I was able to pull the base back flat(ish) by bolting a steel u-channel frame under it.

So far, so good. However, when I ran some tests on the Iroko hard wood I discovered unacceptable chipping out on the back edge. Re-testing with pine confirmed that the 22mm router bit runs through softwood with no noticeable chipping out (as previously discovered) but it doesn't do the same with the hardwood. Mea culpa, I should have tested it with hardwood back then.

So with Plan A in the bin, it was time for a new Plan A ...

Digging some suitable scraps out of the offcuts bin, I knocked up a back stop and simple cross cut sledge for the table saw.

I then glued a printed cutting marker strip to a length of pastic L channel.

From there, it's simply a case of screwing the marker strip to the rail and making repeated cross cuts with the saw blade set to 10mm depth of cut.

And when I say repeated cross cuts, each halving joint takes about 9 or 10 cuts. The end cuts are the only ones that have to be made with accuracy, the intermediate cuts can just be waffled out by eye.

How many cuts? Well, there's no less than 348 halving joints to make, each of which is in two halves (who'dve thunk it eh?) so that's 696 slots to cut in the rails. So something in the order of 6,000 to 7,000 cuts.

Oh the tedium!

Oh the pain!

Yep, pain. I didn't, I hasten to add, remove any digits! I had gone to some lengths when building the cross cut slide to add finger guards and even so was taking great care. However, my arthritis limited cutting sessions to two or three hours a day.

It took about 8 days, maybe 25 to 30 hours of actual working time.

The end result was a big stack of rails with roughed out halving joints roughly where the halving joints needed to be.

And rough is the critical word. The router method resulted in halving joints that fitted together with very little finessing needed.

The table saw method doesn't! They're close but there's an awful lot of clean up and final fitting needed for every joint. By hand with a rasp and file.

It is going to be a laborious and time consuming process to fit all the grating pieces together and it is what it is. I suspect it will take weeks.

With the benefit of hindsight ...

I would either ...

a> invest in a more effective router table setup that could rout the slots across the entire width of a plank before ripping the rails out (this didn't work with our creation as the slide table was too prone to wobbles) or ...

b> set up to run the router out of hand with a guide rail setup to create the slots across the full width of the planks.

In both cases, it would be necessary to sacrifice some plank width with fewer rails per plank (or wider planks to start with) so that any chipping out on the back edge would be removed when the rails were ripped out from the planks.

Or option C would be to spend a sh!t ton of money on much better professional grade machines! And a large enough workshop to put them in. That isn't on the cards unless I win the lottery!!!

I do not buy the old saw that "a bad workman blames his tools". A good workman will manage to do an OK job with shit tools, up to a point, but he'll do a better job with good tools. And to be frank, some of my tools are not great. The table saw was a cheap DIY machine I bought many years ago and it's just about OK for basic stuff. There are way better machines available now even on a tight budget. My mitre saw (which came from my brother) was fairly tired when he acquired it for peanuts second hand. Again, there are way better tools to be had for £200 to £300 now.

If I was starting again on this project, I would splash the case on some better tools. As it is, I don't currently have any future projects in the pipeline that would justify spending the money.

There'll be another hiatus on the project now as I'm off to the floaty thing next week for a few days to make sure she is still a floaty thing and get her ready to do some sailing. More of than anon.

What a May day

 Well, technically more April than May but who can resist a cunning pun. Not me, for sure.

So we kicked off the 2026 "sailing" season (and hopefully the quotation marks will prove erroneous) with the usual mad dash to do all the jobs that have to be done before launching. Actually, this year there wasn't too much to do as the relatively truncated season last year meant a lot of things, like anodes, seacock serviving etc., could be carried forward.

We got down to the boat a week last Friday and got straight on with things on Saturday.

Pagan did need a fresh coat of barnacle food (a.k.a. antifoul) and a good check all round but that was all pretty much done and dusted in a couple of days.

Monday saw me head down to Sussex to pick the new domestic batterys and charger / inverter. In the end, it made financial and time management sense to collect rather than have them delivered even though it wasted half a day plus. I got back in time to make a start with the install so all was not lost.

Tuesday, however, was a washout. I had one of my occasional bad days (low grade headache, mildly upset tummy, general lethargy etc., best summed up as feeling ugh). I think these days, which happen every few weeks, may be migraine related (I also suffer from classic (a.k.a. real!) migraines (which are not just a bad headache). Anyway, write off Tuesday like it never happened.

Fitting the bulky and heavy charger / inverter in the chosen spot tucked up out of the way in the port cockpit locker wasn't much fun but it got done. I had to strip out redundant components of the original autopilot and loads of redundant wiring and work in a rather awkward space (nothing new there then) but I got there in the end. 

Then, with just a teeny bit of wood butchery, I managed to squeeze the new batteries into the battery compartment under the navigators seat. That also wasn't easy as each battery weights 33kg!

Friday was The Big Day.

Yep, time to get her back in her element. And as always the first task when she's lowered into the water is a mad dash around all the underwater intakes and outlets to make sure there's no leaks.

Happily, there were no leaks! Always a relief.

Once alongside the pontoon and safely tied up, the next question was would the engine start. Yep, first turn of the key! There's no reason to doubt that she would start but our confidence in the engine needs rebuilding.

The weekend saw me sorting out the very heavy duty 12v wiring between the new battery bank and the charger inverter. It's meaty 70sq.mm. cable and had to be run through from under the nav table to the port locker and kept as short as possible. Annoyingly, the port fuel tank is in the way of taking the most direct, and least visible, route so I had to run the cables across a visible bulkhead. I'll box that in at a later date. Making up the cables and wiring everything up took a lot of time so it was this morning before I finished the 240v side of the wiring.

And lo! It all worked like a charm.

So we now have a pair of Victron Super Cycle 120a/h AGM batteries coupled to a Victron Multiplus 12/2000/80 charger / inverter with a remote Multicontroller panel at the nav station.

That gives us 80A battery charging when plugged in to an external mains supply and 1600W continous with up to 2000W for short periods of mains power from the inverter when we're not plugged in. Being super cycle batteriers, the battery bank can be regularly discharged by 80% of the rated capacity and will survive being completely discharged occasionally.

There's much more to do on that side of things (battery monitor, solar panels etc.) but it's a very good start.

Once that was done, late morning, it was time to sort out for getting back on our mooring. Dig out the outboard, fetch some fresh petrol, unload anything not needed overnight from the boat etc. Then a dinghy trip up to our mooring to put the mooring tails back on (they're removed for the winter otherwise they end up as a tangled mess of rope and weed) before, with a coffee break to wait for the tide to turn, firing up the Merc and casting off.

We picked up the mooring first time of asking although it has to be admitted that the conditions couldn't have been any better - virtually no wind, flat calm and an ebb tide. Then it was a case of make all shipshape on deck and relax.

 

It's good to be back on our mooring!

One last night on board tonight and then it's away home in the morning.

We've got a fortnight plus lined up towards the end of June and I'm hoping to get down for a few days to work on the to-do list before then (if the big shed will give Jane the time off as she'll need to stay home with the venerable parent while I'm away).

PS. No, there are no photos of the wiring. I'm perfectly happy with *my* efforts but the rest of the wiring on Pagan is, frankly, a mess. I'm working on it but I'm not showing it off!!!

Living on board ... albeit temporarily for now!

So after all the upheavals and disruptions which contrived to thoroughly bugger up our plans for this year, one thing led to another and we ended up with a whole two and a half weeks on board!

In the end though, we decided not to actually go anywhere and stayed at our moorings for the whole time. This was down to a combination of factors as follows ...

Firstly and critically, our lack of battery capacity and charging. As the regular reader will recall, our mains battery charger committed suicide a while back and before ending it's life, it took out all our batteries for good measure. So we're currently reduced to a single 100a/h battery for all purposes (engine starting and domestic) and with an average draw of between 60a/h and 80a/h a day, it ain't enough

To compound matters further, our ancient but previously reliable 20 amp battery charger, which has been kicking around the family since the time of Voltaire, isn't, we discovered, charging at 20 amps any more. It appears to be stuck in float charge mode charging at around 6 amps which meant it needed to be on for 10 to 12 hours a day minimum just to keep up with our usage.

So we tried, we really did, living on the buoy as much as possible but it meant having to run my suitcase petrol generator for long periods of the day and well into the evening and even then we struggled. If it had been bulk charging at 20A it would have been feasible but it just wasn't.

The solution to that was to fit the 80A alternator upgrade to the engine in place of the existing 30A alternator. That would enable us to keep up with our electricity demands by running the engine for an hour or so a day. I'm not a fan of running the engine off load like that but needs must. Or needs would have musted if the damn thing had worked. It took me a whole day to fit the new alternator and sort out the absolute shambles of the wiring (discovering in the process some really dodgy bodges which could potentially have led to an electrical fire ... eek!) only to discover that the brand new alternator is dead.

Reinstalling the 30A alternator got us back charging off the engine anyway but it left us dependent on getting on shore power far more than we ideally would have liked.

Which leads me to the second consideration ... a distinct lack of enthusiasm for anchoring. Once again, the regular reader will recall that we planned to fit an electric anchor windlass and new anchoring gear last winter. Plans which went west with the engine problems and have been deferred to this winter.

The final factor was the weather forecast. Far from being bad, it was, with the exception of Storm Amy, almost too good! There just wasn't going to be much in the way of good sailing winds to be had and if we went anywhere we'd have to spend money on marinas. After due consideration, we concluded that it made rather more sense to stay put as we can go alongside on the pontoon for less than half the cost of a night in a marina.

This did give us the opportunity to do a lot of sorting out on board. I wouldn't claim that Pagan is fully sorted back to how she should be, but she is a lot closer to being ready for cruising than she was! The simple fact is that she's been a shed / yard bound liveaboard for some six years now and it's taking time and effort to put things straight and fix all the things that need fixing.

It was also a really good opporunity to spend some time simply living on board and getting a better handle on what works and what doesn't, how often we need water, fuel, food etc., all data that we can draw on for our future plans.

So we spent the two and a half weeks alternating between our mooring buoy and the pontoon including spending the weekend alongside during Storm Amy. We'd seen what was coming and although the worst of it would pass us by, we decided to make a move onto the inside of the pontoon sooner rather than later. I've known worse conditions at Fambridge but it was bad enough and a very peculiar thing happened with our bow line pulling through a proper cleat hitch. It didn't part, it didn't come undone, it just pulled through until the spring took the strain leaving the bow about eight feet off the pontoon!

I've never known a cleat hitch (the classic O-X-O as taught by the R.Y.A. etc.) pull through like that. Most odd! No harm, no foul other than having to get out on deck in the early hours and pull the bow back in and make it off again adding a locking turn for good measure this time (I don't normally add locking turns, I'm not a fan of doing it, but it seemed sensible to add some extra hold to stop a repeat of the exercise). It did demonstrate the necessity of never relying on one line to do a job, if I hadn't set up proper spring lines as well as the bow and stern lines we'd have been all ends up, quite literally!

The last couple of days on board were rather spoilt by our going down with the dreaded lergy. Jane had been complaining of a chesty cough for a couple of days and then I developed, as I invariably do, full on man flu. Quite where we picked up the bug is anybodies guess given that we'd been all but self-isolating for the previous week but hey ho.

Despite the lergy, we got all the sails off and bagged up safely in the aft cabin and offloaded all that needed to be offloaded. We're booked in to be lifted out into our usual spot in the boatyard next week and then we'll go from there.

We're ten years into owing Pagan next year, doesn't time fly? What that does mean is that it's time for a survey and there's a few thing I need to sort out ahead of that. Nothing drastic but there's some odds and sods that are bound to be picked up on which need sorting anyway.

Plus we need to sort out our battery and charging situation of which more anon and we really want to get the electric anchor windlass etc. fitted before next season. Add to that, the genoa furling gear needs an overhaul, the winches need servicing, all the running rigging needs washing (I think it's all serviceable but it's suffering from lack of use) ... there's a lot to do!

P.S. On looking back, there was a total lack of photos during the trip! So there aren't any!!

Cockpit Gratings - We need a smaller (!) boat ...

 ... or bigger gratings!

("We need a bigger boat", a reference to the film "Jaws", is a standing joke amongst the Pagan crew)

So having finished the router table setup, it was time to try it out on some relatively cheap pine board I had lying around.

The first thing I discovered was that it's easier to work from behind the carriage and push than the more obvious option of standing in front and pulling. 

The second thing I quickly discovered is that my cunning plan of routing the slots in the full width of the boards before ripping them lengthwise into individual rails doesn't work very well.

The problem is that the additional drag of the wide board over the bed of the router table makes it difficult to keep the carriage running true even with our cunning ball race track setup. On two out of three attempts, there was a wiggle part way through. I'm sure it could be made to work with further development and engineering (some means of keeping the runners from lifting up and twisting would be needed) however there's not a lot of advantage over routing the rails individually. It takes a bit longer but not enough to make spending any more time or money on the jig engineering worthwhile.

Ripping the rails out of the board, having cut off the failed slots, took minutes on the table saw and then I set about routing the slots into them. That takes a while and didn't do my back much good - I think I'll look at mounting the jig higher so I'm not having to bend over so much. Bearing in mind that cheap pine board is prone to chipping, the routing went extremely well and cleanly. 

I cut the rails I'd routed in half and did a dry fit. The interlocking rails took some gentle persuasion to go together but the fit wasn't too shabby.

The second dry run, after I'd spent a bit of time cleaning up the slots with a file, went much better and I then set about glueing up a test grating.

Some lessons were learnt along the way such as don't trim the excess off the rails until after glue up (really not sure where my head was at when I did that! I hadn't intended to do it that way round and it made things harder than they needed to be).

I also took note of the need to mark up the order and orientation of the rails during the dry fit more thoroughly than I did on the prototype.

And I think I need to lay in some slow setting wood glue, not an easy thing to find, as the readily available stuff all sets up in under ten minutes. Often that's a big advantage but on this job, when I get on to the full size gratings, I need plenty of time to get everything in place and clamped up.

Oh and clamping the full size gratings is going to present some challenges which I'm pondering.

Once the glue had set up, I hit the top surface and sides with the belt sander and then finished with a finer grit on the palm sander.

I'm pretty damn pleased with the end result!

It's not perfect, there's a few careless dings and I split out a bit on one of the rails on the backside. I also either need some sort of jig to hold the belt sander square ... or to hole the piece square to the belt sander ... when doing the edges. Either that or a bench mounted sander with mitre table (which is on my shopping list anyway).

That said, the fit and finish is considerably better than the factory made originals I'm replacing!

Another proof that prototyping is never a bad thing ... I realised I need to make the gratings up slightly thicker than the final finished thickness (18mm) to give me a decent amount of sanding allowance. The rough sawn boards are nominally 25mm and the usual planing allowance is 3mm per face which would result in 19mm. I think a 1mm sanding allowance would be about perfect so I need to tweak my cutting instructions to remind me to leave 1mm sanding allowance when I'm thicknessing the boards.

Anyway, if the finished gratings are as good as the prototype, I'll be a happy wood butcher. And I'm sure I can do better next time around with the benefit of experience gained.

There's probably going to be a bit of a hiatus on this project now. I've got other things to do over the next couple of weeks and then we've got over a fortnight on board Pagan at the end of the month when hopefully we'll get to go sailing before putting Pagan to bed for the winter.

Cockpit Gratings - router jig development

 Full disclosure ... there's absolutely nothing boaty below! There's also a lot of images

Anyway, one of the challenges of making  new gratings is the considerable number of halving joints that have to be cut in the rails. If each one was cut by hand the traditional way (saw and chisel), it would take a LOT of time 'cos there's no less than 696 of them on the gratings for Pagan!

Confucious he say that if the Gods had intended man to faff about cutting 696 halving joints the hard way, he wouldn't have invented power tools! Even so, it's not as simple as it seems. Each joint needs to be 22mm wide by 9mm deep and spaced on 44mm centres from the adjacent joints. The margin for error is small by woodworking standard - the longest rail is 508mm long and a 1mm error between joints would add up to being 15mm out at the middle (assuming, as I intend to do) starting from the ends to the middle. Needs to be a lot better than that.

I considered various methods...

Our American friends would tool up their table saw with a dado cutter set but they're not available in the UK and Europe because they're considered dangerous (and with good reason as to use them you have to remove the riving knife that prevents the workpiece closing up and grabbing the blade with potentially lethal consquences). That's a none starter then.

I contemplated and sletched designs for clamping the workpiece in a jig with a guide bar setup to use a hand held router with a 22mm cutter to cut the joints. That would have worked well enough I'm sure but then I came up with the notion of turning things on their head and fixing the router whilst moving the workpiece. In theory, that ought to be the simpler solution (in practice, I'm not sure that the first idea wouldn't, in the end, have been easier but hey ho).

So I sketched up a design for a very simple jig  ...

And built it ...

The base is two layers of 9mm MDF, the carriage is made of the same stuff. Underneath is mounted a fairly hefty router donated by my brother who no longer had a use for it.

(There's numerous videos on YouTube of similar jigs and there's off the shelf parts for building them at various levels of sophistication right up to the next best thing to a full spindle moulder setup. however they invariably use trim routers. Iroko, from which the new gratings will be made, is tough stuff and hard on cutting edges so I needed a powerful heavy duty router as the basis for the jig).

It sort of worked. Conceptually, it prooved I was on the right lines. However, it proved impossible to repeatedly keep the carriage tracking at 90 degrees to the router cutter head. I also found that trying to rout a halving joint at the end of a workpiece inevitably led to tear out. There were some other niggles too all of which added up to a case of back to the drawing board to come up with Mk.II

There's quite a lot to unpack here!

First significant change is the use of several 3d printed parts. My brother adapted a design he already had on file for ball bearing track guides as a solution to keeping the carriage square when using the jig. 

I also designed, and Glen 3d printed, a stop bar large enough to accomodate the full width of the Iroko boards. Based on test cuts with the Mk.I jig, I had concluded that it would be faster and more accurate to cut the halving joints into the boards before ripping them down into the individual rails.

I also reworked my cutting plan so that each rail is initially made 44mm too long with the excess to be cut off after the gratings are assembled. That avoids the problem of tearout when trying to run a cut at the end of the workpiece (at the cost of wasted timber but hey ho).

So having a design, and after a trip to Bodgit & Quit for more MDF, I set to making the thing ...

Step 1: Cut the two base plate pieces from a sheet of 9mm MDF

Steps 2 & 3: Cut the track slots and router bit clearance holes in the top plate

Step 4: Mark out and cut the recess for the router show in the bottom plate

Step 5: Glue the top and bottom plates together

Step 6: Mark the mounting holes for the router (bizarrely, only 3 of the 4 pre-drilled holes in the router shoe can be used as the 4th hole is fouled by the depth stop anvil)

Step 7. The holes were then countersunk on the top side of the base plate

Step 8: Mount the router and clamp the base plate in the old Workmate that will be used as as stand for the jig when in use.

(When not in use, the jig will be stored out of the way on a shelf).

Step 9: Cut the pieces for the carriage and step 10: glue them together ensuring they are accurately clamped at 90 degrees (the Mk.1 prototype was a bit of a failure at this stage. The Mk.II is as close to spot on as I'm likely to get!)

Step 11: Cut some reinfocing pieces and step 11; glue them in place

Step 12: Carefully measure, mark and fit the upper ball race rails 3d printed by my brother Glen.

It was vital at this stage that the rails were as close to parallel to each other as humanly possible. Measure many many times, screw down once!

Step 13: Fit the lower ball race rails with the same level of care and attention.

The rails were designed with slotted mountings to allow the positioning to be tweaked as necessary.  As it happens, it was barely neccessary and the carriage glides very nicely backwards and forwards without any racking or twisting

At this point, I realised I'd dropped a bit of a clanger and made the base too small to be able to easily clamp it or the carriage to the Workmate

Easily solved ... I made up two pieces of MDF per side glued together and then ...

... glued them to the base.

That gives me the option to clamp the base to the Workmate (although it seems to clamp well enough on the router shoe) and also to clamp the carriage in place in order to use the jig for other purposes.

At this point I did some test cuts into scrap wood and it was fortunate I did so as I swapped which side of the cutter the guide bar is set (the rotation of the cutter tends to throw the workpiece to the left so having the stop bar on that side prevents that)

The tricky bit now was routing out the mounting slot for the aforementioned stop bar. It needed to be as close to a 44mm offset as possible. Although a certain amount of adjustment is built in to the design, the closer the better to start with.

The trick here was to stick some masking tape onto the base and then superglue down some spare lengths of track carefully at the right spacing ...

... then the carriage could be run on the temporary tracks with the router cutter set to the correct height to cut the slot for the stop bar.

Cutter clearance slot on the left, stop bar slot on the right

Along the way, I'd routed a slot for an adjustable 3d printed hold down clamp (I forgot to take an photos, you'll be relieved to read!).

I also decided I needed to put in a couple of cutouts in the front face of the carriage to make it easier to hold the workpiece in place.

A template was cut out of MDF and temporarily fixed in place using the tape and superglue trick. My own router fitted with a guide wheel cutter then made short work of cutting out the hand holds.

The hand hold routed out and the template after being peeled off

Test cut time!

You can better see the hold down clamp in action and I've just cut the second slot using the stop bar in the first slot I cut

Measuring up, the spacing is spot on.

However, I'd failed to consider that the carriage is held slightly clear of the base plate by the ball races and that necessitated a reprint of the stop bar with the projection thinned down to 6mm instead of 9mm.

I also found that the wood screws securing the stop bar weren't gripping ...

The solution to that problem was to use M4 T nuts. In softwood, they'll bit in and end up flush with the surface of the wood but MDF isn't very compressible to I cut a shallow recess using a Forstner bit to make sure they'd be flush

And the finished router table in all it's glory!

The next step is to run some test cuts and, if necessary, adjust the stop bar to reduce the cumulative spacing errors to an acceptable level (assuming it's not already OK).

I'll experiment with taking some video of it in action but no promises on that front!

The end result has taken a fair bit longer, and cost somewhat more (about £40 not including the router and cutter) then I expected but having made it larger and more sophisticated than stricty necessary it will have a life beyond this one project.

That was the week (and a half) that was

 So having got Pagan back in her element and finding that, as half expected, one or more head bolts had failed to torque down, what happened next?

Simon rocked up on Saturday and we set about dealing with the stripped head bolt thread and it's partner in crime opposite. Although the second bolt had gone down to torque, two out of three of the bolts across the head at the aft end of the engine had now stripped (the centre bolt having already been helicoiled when we first rebuilt the engine) and we decided not to take any chances and do both of the outer bolts.

That was all done in an afternoon and everything put back together again. There's still a few outstanding periperhal jobs, the main ones being fitting a new and relocated engine stop cable and fitting a cooling system header tank and plumbing in the calorifier. These can, however, wait until later possibly even until the winter. We also have a low speed timing issue on the engine, which we suspect is long standing, which again isn't an immediate attention job as at normal running speeds the timing is fine. It won't do the engine any harm as long as we don't trundle around at below 1500rpm for hours on end and I can't imagine we'd ever do that.

Jane and I were then on a mission to turn Pagan inside out and put her back to being a cruising yacht instead of a caravan / workshop. During the course of that excercise, we'd determined that not only were our domestic batteries fried, so was the two or three year old engine battery. It wasn't taking or holding a charge and I've reached the conclusion that before it committed suicide, our defunct battery charger had taken out the domestic and engine batteries.

That meant a trip to Chelmsford to pick up a new No.1 (Engine) Battery from Halfords.I chose a reasonably priced 95a/h sealed lead acid battery, larger than really needed for the No.1 battery but it'll have to do double duty as I won't be fitting new domestic batteries until over the winter (we need more capacity than we can squeeze into the existing battery compartment and that means a new battery box in the port cockpit locker which isn't a quick job to create).

Finally, by Tuesday, we were ready to let go from the pontoon and go for a blat up and down the river within sight of the moorings. A good solid hour plus of zooming up and down and I was a very happy chappy.

We picked up our mooring on the second attempt and picked up where we'd left off on the immediate to-do list. The principal job now was sorting out the running rigging, bending on the sails and fitting the new sail covers.

She does look shipshape and seamanlike now she's sporting her full rig again!

That said, all of the running rigging needs to come off over the winter and be thoroughly cleaned. I don't think we need to replace anything, all the lines are sound, but it's all grungy and stiff.

The big test came on Saturday ...

Could we make it to Burnham-on-Crouch without breaking down?

Yes we could!

We probably got some funny looks motoring downriver when the sailing conditions were near perfect but this was an engine test run not a jolly. And she performed flawlessly finishing off with just about the nearest thing to a perfect marina docking manoeuvre we've ever managed.

We met up with Simon at The Old White Hart for a meal and beer where we were joined for drinks by our good friends Neal and Jos. It was nice to get out for the night but the fly in the ointment was an unfolding family crisis back at home. That had to be left in the hands of other family members overnight as there was nothing we could do about it!

Sunday saw us run back up to Fambridge again under motor. No funny looks this time as the wind was, in any case, due wrong blowing straight down the river. Given the overnight wind forecast and the need to unload the boat and get away as early as possible the next day, we decided to splash the cash and go alongside for the night.

We really do need to cut down on the amount of kit we take away with us as it takes way too much time and effort to cart it to and from the van to the boat! Anyway, by mid-morning we were ready for the off.

There was a stiff breeze blowing downriver and a bit of a chop running but we succeeded in picking up our mooring at the first attempt. Getting the second buoy tail aboard and made fast was a bit of an excercise though as it had wrapped itself around the riser chain. A bit of faffing about and we got it sorted and made fast.

All that remained was to shut down and switch off everything - seacocks closed, gas and electric off and isolated, all things that lock locked and that was that. A ride ashore on the trot boat and away home.

So ended a very pleasing eleven days. Pagan is back in commission and shapng up. I am feeling the love again, it's been sheer bloody mindedness that's got us through the last 12 months as a year ago we were on the ragged edge of calling it a day.

There's still a mahoosive to-do list but it's back to being things we planned and/or anticipated.

We're not sure exactly what our plans are for the rest of the summer and autumn as a combination of Jane's work rota being changed, yet again, and the aformentioned domestic crisis (a very elderly father who up until now has been able to care for himself but may now need someone present 24/7), mean that we're going to have to re-plan and change holiday bookings etc.

I'm hoping we can get out for a short cruise to somewhere other than the River Crouch before the season is over. We'll see.

We're also undecided about whether to haul out for the winter or leave her in. Hauling out is expensive but on the other hand it's not easy to do significant work on the boat when she's in the water. And by next spring there are several projects I want finished - the v-berth refit, fitting new anchoring gear including an electric winch and new domestic batteries and charger/inverter being the main ones.

Onwards and upwards ...

Splash!

 A hectic day today. Picked up Jane from the Big Shed at 06:00, drove down to the boat arriving 08:15 and got our heads down for a few Zzzzs.

Wiggy rocked up about 12ish to put us back in the water for the first time since last year.

It's always nerve wracking when the boat goes back in, the more so when you've drilled new holes in the bottom of the bolt. The moment the boat is lowered into the water, it's a mad dash round all the skin fittings etc. with a torch checking for leaks. And there was indeed a leak!

It was, however, a minor affair. The jubilee clips on the new raw water intake just needed tightening up further. No big deal and soon sorted. Then it was a tow round onto the river pontoon and make fast alongside.

Simon arrived and after carrying out further checks around the engine, it was time to fire her up. We had, of course, run her briefly whilst ashore (a bit naughty but needs must), now it was time to see if she'd start and run properly.

And happy days, she started and ran properly! The new cooling pump is rather effective, much more so than itd predecessor and the cunning bracket designed by Simon to engineer my cunning suggestion of turning the pump through 180 degrees (so that the impeller can be changed more easily) works a treat.

Then having run her up to operating temperature and let her cool back down a bit (per the manual) it was time to see if the head bolts would all torque down. We were expecting two or three of them to strip the threads as they hadn't felt great when initially torqued down a few weeks ago. And sure enough, one did.

It might be possible to sort it without taking the head off but neither Simon nor I feels 100% happy with doing that and for the sake of a new head gasket and a few extra hours work, tomorrow we'll pull the head off again and helicoil the stripped threads. In fact, we've had a thunk about it and collectively agreed that for the sake of an extra hour or two of drilling and tapping, we'll helicoil all the remaining threads and have done with it. It would be beyond frustrating to just do the one that's stripped and then have another one go when we're back to final torque down (hopefully on Sunday!). That would be a proper show stopper as Simon has to be elsewhere for a few days next week, we're not his only customers (hi Neal and Jos ☺)

So there we are for today. Floating, not sinking, running but not quite running in. I'm not downhearted, this was anticipated hence my having laid in the spare gaskets to do it if necessary.