Sustainable Sailing

Today was quite daunting. We have got used to the process of fitting the new windows after two days and 4 windows. However, today was forecast to be a lot windier and a lot colder. Plus we set ourselves the challenge of fitting 3 windows, because that is one side of the saloon and so they are all on the same “wall” with a common piece of headlining to remove. We decided to start with the starboard side, where the chart table (our temporary galley is) as we knew there were definitely leaks there (plus it was slightly sheltered from the wind by the cabin).

The day started with the first big challenge being to clear everything out of the main cabin, our temporary galley, our bags of food, any other bags we hadn’t put anywhere, tools etc etc.

Then we started on the headlining. First, we had to remove some vinyl covered strips of wood around the edges. Plus a couple of grab handles (disappointed that 50% of the bolts snapped when trying to undo them). Then as before the actually lining almost fell off, and it was very wet, waterlogged even, in places. Here are two pictures of the very wet fibreglass and wood above the chart table.

A mixture of scraping with hand tools and attacking it with a wire brush drill attachment improved things to this point:

and you can see here that the holes for the bolts have also been drilled (and the right hand window above the chart table has been cut out slightly for the porthole.

In this next picture you can see where we go to by lunchtime. The three new windows are held in temporarily by one bolt at each end. All the holes have been though drilled and the interscrews (a special form of nut that is knocked into a hole and grips with splines around it’s edge) fitted to the inside.

After this we can draw around the windows, remove them, apply masking tape, the butyl sealing sheet, cutout the inside of the sheet, remove the protective film from both sides of the window, bolt the window on securely, trim the butyl sheet around the edges and finally remove the masking tape.

Here is what it looks like when all three windows were finally fitted.

At this point we were half way. 7 windows fitted (over 3 days) and 7 windows remaining. 3 windows with portholes fitted and 3 remaining. However, we do feel we have done the most difficult windows (the first as we learned how to do it and the two aft ones with portholes due to the clashes with bulkheads which both get in the way and increase the thickness of the fibreglass – so that the interscrews have to be indented for the bolts to reach them).

Anyway, it wasn’t quite half past 4 so we pressed on and have managed to do lots of preparation for tomorrow, all the headlining has been removed from the port side of the saloon. This include-d some sections that were even wetter 😦

We then spent an age vacuuming up all the mess in the saloon, hopefully tomorrow we will be able to fit the remaining saloon windows quickly and make a start on the 4 that will be left (2 with portholes for the forward head, 2 plain for the forecabin).

We are very, very pleased with how they look from the outside. On the inside we get a lot more light and view because there is no frame and of course the potential ventilation where we the portholes. They look a bit rough at the edges at the moment due to the lack of headlining. However, we have a cunning plan for that 🙂

By the way the windows are all supplied by Hadlow Marine who were really helpful. They supplied everything we needed and exactly as specified (and the specification was tricky because all the windows along a side are different sizes). We have changed the shape of the outside of the windows so that all the ends are semi-circular to match the Vetus portholes. Before that each corner was the same but the vertical distance between corners varied.