We won’t be making direct progress on Vida this Friday as I’m working. Still we have been making some progress at home.
Jane has ordered more foam for the saloon (dinette backrests and the outboard portion of the sea berth).
I’ve been collecting a few more parts for the remaining jobs. Now that we have discovered the bilge, I’ve got a water level sensor and an electric bilge pump that it will control. That will mean that should there be a leak we can focus on finding and solving the cause while the pump keeps the water at bay as much as possible. Also if water comes in while we are off the boat then at least it will get pumped out for a while (given that the only holes below the waterline will be for the cockpit drains we have massively reduced the chances of this, unless sea lions attack us). However, there are some problems.
Firstly, at the moment we don’t have good enough access.
Secondly, it looks disgusting. We can’t allow water to get contaminated with all this yuck get pumped out into the sea.
So I’ve got some heavy duty bilge cleaner to try to get it clean enough to not contaminate any water that sits in it. Plus we want to get it clean enough for epoxy resin to stick to it, so that we have options for reducing it’s size and adding some strength (more bio-epoxy arriving soon).
Another area of progress has been towards more visible progress. We’ve ordered everything to fully refurbish our two hatches (one over thee aft cabin and the other over the saloon). Currently, the acrylic is so crazed that you can’t see through it, we had thought we would leave this until later but there are leaks between then acrylic and the frame, leaks in the seal in the frame and leaks between the frame and the deck. At the same time we have ordered a new acrylic panel for the roof of the wheelhouse, you couldn’t see through it and it was also leaking. All of that from Hadlow Marine for less than half the cost of one new hatch.
Finally, a spot of good news is that while the extra batteries are delayed due to the Coronavirus our electric motor has been shipped and we should have it in a couple of weeks (I’m by no means minimising the terrible effects of the virus and fully recognise that a bit of inconvenience for us counts as nothing).
I’ve also corrected the part of the drivetrain that I’d got wrong (maybe I’m on the way to becoming a tapered bush bearing expert) and we should have that soon. There are still some decisions to make and parts to order before we will be ready to connect the motor to the propeller but no rush as I don’t want to make mistakes.
Sustainable Sailing 