Escape from the river!

 A whole seventeen days on board! Luxury :)

Thanks to the family stepping up and stepping in to undertake Grandpa sitting duties (my elderly father cannot be left on his own these days, which is a bit limiting on what we can do but needs must) Jane and I headed down to North Fambridge on the afternoon of Friday the 26th of June.

We had no specific plans other than a determination to actually get out of the River Crouch for the first time since before covid. In fact, going back through the logs it was August of 2018 since we last went anywhere beyond Burnham-on-Crouch. Ouch! (Sorry, I couldn't resist a rhyme there).

I've blogged all the various reasons for that ongoing situation but it really has to stop sometime.

With malice aforethought, a burning desire to go sailing notwithstanding, we spent the first few days sorting out various tasks on board. None were particularly significant however we felt it needful to have a major clear out of the lockers and the aft cabin, offloading a lot of gear that simply isn't needed on board (accumulated detritis of the various repairs and upgrades plus stuff hanging around from when I was living aboard during the week), and organising the cockpit locker stowage better.

During this time, we were very good and stayed out on our mooring buoy! Even with having to run the suitcase generator every day, we were saving quite a lot of money by doing so and nothing we were doing really needed us to be alongside.

Whilst all that was going on, I ran into Dave the Rigger (DRS Rigging Ltd.) and arranged for him to come out the following Thursday morning to tune our standing rigging. In the meantime, whilst he was out looking at another boat moored just upstream from us he had a quick look at ours and recommended I put about three full turns on everything for now.

This was fairly crucial as the standing rigging had never been finally set up after it was replaced no less than four years ago :o - we'd had all the aforementioned issues and we'd never been able to coordinate a time when the boat was rigged and in the water and we were there and Dave could fit us in.

So I popped out and acquired a supply of new split pins and then set about cranking up the adjusters. It was much better for it, the genoa furling gear for example was now back working as it should (a slack forestay causes the furler to jam up).

The arrangement with Dave did mean we'd have to be back a few days early but the opportunity to get it sorted at last was not one we wanted to pass up.

Spot the boat. Pagan is in shot somwhere!

By Tuesday evening we were sorted out, fueled up and ready to go sailing. So on Wednesday we did! Albeit only as far as good old Burnham for the night but we had a very pleasant bimble downriver under genoa only with the engine off most of the way.

We'd planned to head on out on Thursday but the weather forecast put paid to that idea. We had a Met Office strong wind warning for the inshore waters between Gibraltar Point (North side of the Wash) and North Foreland (the top left hand corner of Kent) and my preferred weather app was suggesting F5 gusting F6 or occasionally F7. Nope, too spicey for us!

Our good friends Neal and Jos offered a trip out by car to Wibblers Brewery in Southminster. Well actually, to be honest, Neal suggested a pleasant eight mile there and back walk with lunch in the middle. Walk? WALK?? Not with my knees and hips!

Jesting apart, not so long ago I'd have been well up for it as, apart from being a bit too breezy, it was a lovely day but I'm not at all sure I could manage it now and even if I could it would be painful. So with good grace Neal offered to drive us all there instead. And it was fantastic! Good beer (I do like a drop of Wibblers and they had a summery pale ale on which was just the ticket), a good lunch and extremely good company.

Friday brought, potentially, the opposite problem. Not enough wind! The forecast was for F2 Westerly and in order to have sufficient tide to get into our intended destination, Bradwell Marina, we'd need to punch the tide all the way out to the Spitway and I suspected we'd not have enough wind to do it. I was right!

To make matters more interesting, when we hoisted the sails once clear of the moorings at Burnham, the mizzen boom fell off the mast! Team Pagan stepped up to the mark and between Jane and myself, we got the sail and boom off and safely stowed down below. I could immediately see that the pin that secures the boom to the gooseneck (the pivot between the mast and the boom) had gone awol.

Whilst not ideal, Pagan sails OK without the mizzen so we motor sailed, and to be honest it was more motor than sail until we could hang a left ...

Friday 3 Jul 2026 Burnham Yacht Harbour - Bradwell Marina 27.2NM ave. 4.6kts

I'd sort of hoped for a beam reach into the Blackwater however the first leg across from the Spitway was hard on the wind. Although a bit unbalanced and heavy on the helm without the mizzen sail, Pagan pointed up beautifully and with the rising tide under us I could hold that point of sail across the shoal waters of Eagle and the Colne Bar thus, I expected, reducing the number of tacks we'd have to put in to beat up to Bradwell.

For once, however, the weather gods were smiling on us. As we crossed the entrance to the River Colne and I started to peer more closely at the chart deciding how far I could push towards the Mersea Flats before tacking, we got a wind shift and were able to lay a course directly towards the old power station cooling water intake just of the entrance to Bradwell Creek.

We were sailing really well, hitting over seven and a half knots at times (albeit with probably a knot or so of tide under us) even though there wasn't a particularly strong breeze. So well were we going that we were overtaking everything else out there under sail! I kid you not, we were sailing past several other boats with ease.

All good things must come to an end though and as we were approaching the cooling intake the wind died away to virtually nothing. No point mucking about, down with the sails, on with the noise machine and into Bradwell we motored, negotiating a berth for a couple of nights over the VHF along the way.

We were alongside and blowing the froth off the first pint in the marina bar before 3pm!

We'd sailing (or motored) 27.2NM in 5h56 at an average speed of 4.57kts and, apart from the mizzen boom falling off, it had all gone well.

Better still, once back on board I found the awol pin under the cockpit gratings and refitted the boom before settling down for the night.

After a brief debate on venue, we'd booked a birthday meal for Jane's birthday (actually the Friday) for Saturday evening in the marina bar.

Saturday we went a viking to raid the supplies at the community shop in Bradwell on Sea. It's a bit of a hike (about a mile and a half each way) but the knee and hip stood up to it fairly well and essentials such as mile and biccies plus some, it turned out, rather good local butcher's sausages etc. were procured. Then it was off to the bar for the aforementioned meal.

Over our after dinner drinks (which followed the during dinner drinks which, in their turn, had followed the pre-dinner drinks!) we debated what to do next. And we concluded that there wasn't a lot of point in moving a couple of miles and that with the need to be back at base by Wednesday we weren't terribly inclined to head further afield. So we decided to stay put at Bradwell for a third night and then decide whether to head back to the Crouch on Monday or leave it until Tuesday depending on the weather.

Bradwell, to their credit, have not jumped on the crazy pricing bandwagon that's been rolling up the East Coast in recent years. Prices for moorings, both visitor and long term, are on the up and up and in many places are not far off the ridiculous pricing we know and know on the South Coast.

Bradwell are still charging East Coast prices and in fact their pricing is such that, depending on how things pan out over the next year or two, we're actually debating moving to a marina berth there.

So there we are in Bradwell on a Sunday lunchtime and what to do? Go to the Green Man of course! Better still, a table was available so we indulged ourselves in an excellent Sunday roast.

Once back aboard, a brief dose of enthusiasm saw the mizzen sail bent back on

Later that evening, it was time to get stuck in to some fairly complex passage planning. The forecast was for F4 Westerly and we'd need some rising tide to get out of Bradwell. Given that a long beat back into the Crouch from the Spitway with wind over tide is a prospect only a masochist or a complete moron would contemplate with any enthusiasm, cutting the corner and sneaking over the Ray Sand offered a much more pleasing prospect of a decent beam reach followed by a much shorter slog into and up the river.

Monday 6 Jul 2026 Bradwell Marina - Burnham Yacht Harbour 21NM ave.4.31kts

This is real East Coast sailing! Get it wrong and at best it is embarrassing, at worst it's a disaster. Running gently aground on a rising tide isn't a big issue. In fact, the Thames barges used to do it routinely, nosing into the creek they needed to get into and then touching and going as the tide rose, letting the boat find its own way. That, it is said (and it's credible) is where the expression "touch and go" comes from.

However, hit the sands of the Thames Estuary at speed and it's serious damage time. It is not forgiving at all. So I had a plan, to sail East out of the Blackwater, hang a right between the mid-river shoal called The Knoll and St. Peter's Flats sailing over the Bachelor Spit and thence down to the Ray Sand. I worked out my tide timings and included in my plan the earliest time I would have enough water to cross the shallows. 

Off we duly went on Monday leaving about 12:45. We made a bit of a hash of getting the sails up just outside of Bradwell if I'm honest but we got it sorted out even though it involved a bit of wandering back and forth getting her pointed into the wind to hoist the sails. It all took the best part of quarter of an hour but no matter. 

Downwind sailing is not my favourite activity but we got along well enough making between 3 and 4 knots despite a foul tide. As we cleared Sales Point and the tide went more cross track, our speed picked up to 5 or 6 knots and by quarter past two we were at the mark to turn South.

Now things started to get a bit leery. F4 my bottom, it was more like F5 rising and gusting 6. We were at times fairly screaming along at well over 6 knots over the ground and hitting over 7 knots at times. I rolled away a good chuck of the genoa and still she romped on. By now, I was thinking about whether to reef the main and the old saw is that if you think of reefing then reef or regret it. However, a bigger concern was looming - my timings were that we must not attempt to cross the drying Ray Sand before 2:30pm under any circumstances and that was predicated on relatively flat water and tickling across at low speed in case we touched. 

Despite my efforts to depower the sails, we kept getting faster! That could only mean one thing, the wind speed was rising. And more wind means more waves. Waves go up and down. Therefore boats sailing over waves go up and down. And down means less water between the keel and the hard stuff.

Crash tack and sails down!

As we started across the sands, we had way too much speed on, we were hanging on the edge of losing control and the final straw was the depth sounder clicking below the 1m under the keel mark. At that point I pulled the plug and crash tacked back to the North again. We rolled away the genoa completely and sort of hove to (ish) head reaching at less than a knot of speed with the depth sounder heading back into safe territory again.

After a minute or two to catch our breath, and with considerable care, I went on deck and got the mainsail down and roughly stowed (although to my annoyance later, the tie I put on to hold the head board down came adrift and we had to put up with the main flapping about rather more than I'd have liked). The mizzen we left up as lowering it would make little difference and unless it's stowed away properly it gets in the way (more of that anon).

With the engine on and another 20 minutes of tide rise, we made our way over the Ray Sand with ample water and no nasty surprises. The nasty surprise (which wasn't really a surprise, we know our home river!) was that we now had a rather nasty and rather slow slog into the Crouch with the dreaded wind over tide. 

That meant giving the engine a jolly good thrashing which, I'm happy to report, it handled with aplomb. In times past we'd have probably ducked into the Roach and anchored for the night in the Brankfleet. However, our lack of fitness and burgeoning chronic health issues do not lend themselves to recovering a heavy anchor and chain with an ancient manual windlass. Anchoring is off the agenda until we can afford to fit an electric windlass (and have the time to fit it). So two great minds thought alike, we looked at each other and, with one voice, said "Burnham"!

The anemometer isn't reading (fixing it is on the to do list but it isn't a high priority) but I reckon we had a solid 20 plus knots of wind on the nose with gusts above that. Not fun. We got into Burnham Yacht Harbour about twenty past five, just too late to get a pint in the bar!

We'd sailed and motored 21NM in 4h52m at an average speed of 4.3kts. Job done.

It had been a bit of a tester and we'd come through it OK. It has, however, up our minds made on a couple of things. Lazy jacks (light lines which hold the sail on top of the boom when the sail is lowered) will be going on asap. Not a particularly big or expensive job. And bringing the main control lines back to the cockpit, something I've previously up my mind not made about, is now definitely under serious consideration. There are some challenges as Pagan wasn't designed with it in mind but they can be overcome.

We stayed aboard for the evening and I cracked a can from the emergency beer stores.

Tuesday we bimbled back up to Fambridge under motor. The wind was still Westerly, i.e. due wrong. but much less enthusiastic than the previous day. With Dave coming out Thursday morning and a couple of trolley loads of "stuff" to offload into the skip or the container, the results of our tidying exercise, we went alongside the river pontoon for a couple of days.

Wednesday we did some shopping and then continued the boat sorting. By the end of the day, there was nothing left on board that shouldn't be on board. Dave came out and did his stuff with the rig on Thursday morning then I set about trying to get the autopilot working better. I'll probably come back to that topic in more detail later but as things stand it isn't working well.

We really ought to have moved back onto our mooring on Thursday but it didn't happen! It did happen on Friday. Saturday was more autopilot fiddling to no avail and then spent some thinking time about how to fit solar panels and other projects in the pipeline.

I decided it made sense to drop onto the pontoon for a couple of hours on Sunday to offload our gear and put some charge in the batteries which were down to 20%. The technical data on the batteries recommends storing them at around 13.4 to 13.6 volts which equates to about 80% of full charge. I was hoping that by the time we'd put the tender and outboard away, unloaded the boat and sorted out ready to leave they'd get up to nearly that and happily they made it to exactly 13.4v.

By now, it was blowing a bit of a hooley from the East 'Nor East and the tide was going out. Yep, wind over bloomin' tide again! It was blowing us off sufficiently hard to make rigging the moorings ready to slip a tricky proposition. Happily, a couple of fellow moorers were about and offered to let go our lines when we were ready which they duly did. I got a little caught out by the bow blowing across rather rapidly and bumped the stern on the pontoon but no harm done (the paintwork doesn't count).

Then we bounced our way back the hundred and fifty yards or so to our mooring and picked it up first go. It is much easier when you only let go three hours earlier and the strops haven't had time to get in a tangle! All that was left to do was to switch off the gas and electrics, close the seacocks, lock up and head for home via the trot boat, the M11 and the A14!

All in all, an unambitious but extremely good and enjoyable fortnight plus aboard. We're next down for 10 or 11 days in September. Weather permitting it would be nice to get even further from base!

Passage Plan - Tuesday 7/7/2026

 Departing Burnham Yacht Harbour by 13:00 towards North Fambridge Yacht Station eta 14:30

Will likely be motoring as breeze is Westerly

Intention is to go alonside the river pontoon for 2 nights (Jane has aggravated her bad back so picking up the mooring for 24 hours considered less than ideal and we need to be alongside on Thursday morning for the rigger to tune the standing rigging)

Passage Plan - Monday 06/07/2026

 Depart Bradwell Marina @ 12:30 towards home mooring @ North Fambridge Yacht Station eta 18:30

Intended route via Bachelor Spit and the Ray Sand. Alternative route via the Spitway

Alternatives: 

Return to Bradwell or head for Brightlingsea if passage to the Crouch not possible for any reason

Burnham Yacht Harbour if progress upriver too slow etc.

Alongside at NFYS if necessary

Bradwell LW 10:28 1.2, HW 17:03 4.8, 2.0m rising @ 12:30, 2.5m rising @ 13:15

Holliwell Point LW 10:55 1.3, HW 17:11 4.9, 3.5m of rising tide @ 14:40

North Fambridge HW 17:36 4.9

Departure timed to give more than sufficient water to exit Bradwell Creek whilst not arriving of St. Peters too early

Intention is to cut across Bachelor Spit (least depth at CD 0.6m) and, with caution, cross the Ray Sand (dries 1.4m)

ETA at St Peters Flats approx. 13:15, if early hold on Eastwards to the Knoll east cardinal and then decide whether to lay a course for the Ray Sand or to the Spitway

ETA at Ray Sand North waypoint (0.5m North of the Raysand North yellow mark which dries) 14:30

UNDRR NO CIRCUMSTANCES press on beyond the Ray Sand North waypoint early. If early, wait! Ware wave action

Proceed with caution at reduced speed over the sands, grounding gently on the rising tide will not be a problem. Hitting hard would be!

Expect to lose the tide on the final stretch to North Fambridge

Met Office forecast Gib Pt to Nth Foreland: variable 2 to 4, becoming 4 or 5 for a time. Smooth or slight. Occasional rain in North. Good occasionally moderate in North

(about as much use as usual but no strong wind warning)

Windy forecast: Westerly F4, gusting F5 later, 0.2m to 0.3m wave height

(Expect some potential wind over tide waves in the Crouch. Expect to be motoring once across the Ray Sand)

Passage Plan - Friday 03/07/2026

Depart Burnham Yacht Harbour 08:00 towards Bradwell Marina e.t.a. 15:00
via Spitway (Raysand shortcut not viable due to tide times)

Alternates: Brightlingsea; Pyefleet Creek (mooring if available) or return to BYH if progress towards Spitway too slow

Do NOT cross Spitway before 10:00 (sufficient rise of tide for a safety margin)

Bradwell LW 08:52 1.0, HW 15:17 5.0, LW 21:23 0.5

Min. 2m of tide to enter Bradwell Creek (check tide gauge) - entry should be possible between 11:00 & 18:50 however extreme care required on a falling tide if entering late

Berth on end of A pontoon pending allocation of a berth or call on VHF Ch.80 before arrival (tel: 01621 776235 / 776391)

Brightlingsea LW 08:50 0/9, HW 15:09 4.7, LW 12:23 0.5

Mn. 2m of tide to enter creek, same restrictions as Bradwell above

BRIGHTLINGSEA HARBOUR VHF Ch.68 on approach, waiting area is to the north of the north cardinal beacon (Q Fl) wait until met by a member of the harbour staff in the harbour launch,

All times BST

Forecast Nor'westerly F2 gusting 3 settling to F2 later, vis good, sea state smooth

Notes: punching a foul tide to the Spitway but hoping for a beam reach with sufficient wind to sail it which may be optimistic. Should then have a fair tide to Bradwell, wind dropping off and more on the nose so might struggle to make way under sail. It seems to be feast or famine when it comes to wind!

Passage Plan (Yay!)

 Don't get carried away though, it's not that exciting today :)

Departing North Fambridge @14:45 towards Burnham Yacht Harbour eta @ 16:00

Alternate: return to NFYS

(with a view to heading up to Harwich or round to the Blackwater on Thursday weather permitting)

2 p.o.b. (Bruce & Jane Peckett)

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.

Cockpit Gratings - the project - introduction and first steps

 So Pagan has a once nice set of Teak cockpit gratings. Sadly, however, they've seen better days!

To the left is the largest of the three gratings and as you can see it's in a state. Several of the rails have gone walkabout and an area to the left of the picture had become so rotten that my foot all but went through it when I hopped down into the cockpit a while back. That had been fixed with a temporary piece of plywood.

Underneath, the frame joints are starting to come apart and there's rot and even some "nail" sickness (actually screw sickness) where the steel screws have corroded and damaged the surrounding wood.

As a temporary measure to keep us going, I stripped out all the old grating cores and screwed split lengths of decking timber to the existing frames. It's practical but not especially attractive and, no, you're not getting a photo of them!

I was hoping that the main frames would be salvegable but they're too far gone. I could also buy the gratings to cut to size and fit within either the existing frames or new frames but they're eye wateringly expensive. And I have a fancy for a serious woodworking project so I going to set to and make all new gratings entirely from scratch.

It's not going to be my first woodworking rodeo, I've done a fair bit of wood butchery in the past and I've got a reasonable collection of tools. I've also now got a space to work in, albeit it's not exactly a huge space, having demolished the rotten wreck of what had been my brother's shed when he lived here and replaced it with a new 11'x8' plastic shed (in hindsight, I wish I'd spent more money on a good timber shed - the plastic shed is OK-ish but it's not great). I've got power and lighting to it and a security system although I won't be keeping valuable equipment in there (that'll have to be moved to and fro as needed).

So what's going to be involved? 

I'll post in more detail about the design stage in a seperate post as it's quite involved but simply put there's the timber frame around the outside, a sub-frame underneath that which carries the actual grating, two upright rails down either side underneath upon which the gratings stand and, the complex bit, the actual gratings themselves which are made of interlocking rails.

You can sort of see how they work in the picture of the smallest of the gratings which also happens to be the one in the "best" condition (as it's only got one loose rail, so far!)

To recreate the gratings will mean cutting a lot of rabbets in a lot of pieces of wood and for that we're going to (try to) work smarter rather than harder by building a custom routing jig. In fact, I've already built a Mk.1 version (of which more anon) which has been both a proof of concept (in that it sort of worked) and highlighted a number of issues which we're working to resolve.

The old gratings are made of Teak and I wish I could stick with that. Getting hold of good quality teak in any significant quantity is not easy and when you can get it the price is horrendous. What's more, the FSC certified teak that is available is almost all African Teak, not Burma Teak, and whilst it is similar it isn't considered suitable for boat decks (and therefore it's unlikely to be suitable for cockpit gratings).

So I'm going to be using poor man's teak, more properly known as Iroko. Whilst not quite as durable, it has many of the same qualities as teak and looks very similar. Plus, it's readily available at a vaguely sensible price! In fact, I've already bought and collected it ... or most of it as I'm going to need one more board as a result of a bit of a process rethink. 

The timber is supplied rough sawn that being considerably cheaper than buying it PAR (Planed All Round). And happily I have a small planer / thicknesser with which to process the timber down to exactly the sizes I require. Or I had until I blew it up! In fairness to the poor machine, it had been left sitting on the floor of a damp garage for several years and frankly it was a miracle it worked at all even if it only did so briefly. Replacing it with a new one, the same as the old one, was not prohibitively expensive and the old one has been stashed away as a source of replacement drive belts (prone to snapping) and what have you.

I have an old basic table saw which, with a new blade fitted, is working fine (so far, touch wood!), a sliding compound radial chop saw I acquired off my brother who has also supplied a hefty router which will be used on the aforementioned routing jig, a set of bar clamps and a whole crate of saws, planers, sanders etc. along with chisels, mallets, drills, plus cutters ... in short, I've got most of what I need and what I haven't got I can either manage without or buy for prices I can feasibly afford.

Which brings me back to preparing the workspace ... I won't kid on that it's anything even vaguely approaching a workshop! It's compact and bijou but it's enough. I've got some racking space down one side for storage and two workbenches on the other side.

One, which can be seen above right, is a cheap new bench I've bought to be used as my "engineering" bench. That bench will likely feature in future projects such as a new switch panel, new boom end fittings (how they're going to be made is being hotly debated currently!) and others.

To the left of it is an old woodworking bench my Dad acquired off his friend Richard who in turn had acquired it off his Dad. We didn't give it much thought or even think that much of it until, after moving it from the aforementioned damp garage into the shed and perusing several, mostly American, woodworking YouTube videos, I realised there was rather more to it than initially met the eye.

The planing stop after removal

It turns out to be a good example of a classic "English" style joiners bench and it was probably originally the personal bench of a professional joiner. Whilst on the smaller end of the size scale, these benchs were never huge being quite narrow and only 5'  to 7' long. This one is a 5' example. The giveaways that it's professional kit are twofold - it has a very fancy rebated sprung loaded planing stop and an equally fancy fitting for a holdfast clamp.

The holdfast fitting, removed and upside down

Sadly, the actual holdfast clamp is long gone, I wish I had it! But a cheap holdfast was £12 off Amazon and works surprisingly well as I shall demonstrate later.

I removed these fittings because there was one major problem with the table top - a slight hump in the middle which meant work rocked around on it.

I didn't want to go berserk and plane the whole thing down to a perfect finish but I did need it fairly flat.

So I attacked is judiciously with the planer and the orbital sander until the hump was no more ...

Then I carefully cleaned out the rebates for the fittings with a chisel until they sat back just below the surface of the bench ... which they didn't quite before I started anyway - and reinstalled the planing stp and the holdfast dog hole.

The planing stop springs up as you undo the screw and holds a workpiece as you push against it, usually for planing the top surface as the name suggests.

The holdfast clamp is a primitive beast! You simply drop the leg down the hole with the pad on top of the workpiece then whack it on the top of the leg with a big hammer!

It works!

To remove it, just whack it again, this time on the side at the top of the leg, and it pulls back out. It looks Medieval ... and it is! If not older as there's evidence of bascially the same device being used by carpenters all the way back into antiquity and beyond.

Sneaking into the background there is a modern metal tail vice I added the other day. This style of bench didn't usually have a tail vice but I wanted one. I just need to add some wooden face plates to it and it'll be ready for use.

The original wooden face vice has had it I'm afraid. There's no end of play in the wooden threaded screws, the handles have both broken and it's beyond salvation. I shall be replacing it with a cast metal face vice when I make up my mind which one I'm going to go for!

I shall also likely be making a few other mods to the bench. I'm probably going to replace the backboard (which is almost certainly not original) with a taller one to which I can attach some storage for screws etc. and I'll almost certainly be adding some additional dog holes - one or more on the facing board would aid with working longer pieces of timber and there may be a need for additional holes in the worktop but I shall hold off on that until the need becomes apparent.

I forgot to mention that on a pre-existing paved area out front of the shed there's a larger heavy duty outdoor work bench which doubles up as Dad's potting bench and somewhere I can set up my table saw and thicknesser provided it's not raining.

So there we have it for now. This is going to be a slow burn project, I don't expect to finish the gratings for some time (months rather than weeks) as there's still a lot of work to do on various aspects of the design and process. Especially the process!