Sustainable Sailing

Rather than returning to Friday updates I thought I’d share progress bu visits. Our first visit in 2021 was really just a checkup and a nicer place to work from. Last weekend we managed a couple of nights and made some real progress 🙂

Most of our progress has left Vida looking a bit more naked 🙂

We have got the bow roller, anchor locker hatch, pullpit and guardrails off. We found that the pin for the forestay was pretty worn.

Also the hole it was using has been elongated.

There was a lot of water trapped under some of the pullpit legs

We (Jane) have managed to clean up the anchor locker a lot

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I was delighted that it was much easier than I expected to remove the bow roller and that it looks straightforward to have it adapted for our Spade anchor and new forestay setup. As well as extending it out forward a bit so that the anchor fits better and doesn’t hit the boat, we will be adding some extra length coming aft with extra bolts to counteract the leverage of the anchor. We will also add means to ensure that neither the chain nor anchor can “escape” and chafe through the forestay.

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The anchor locker is going to be radically changed. I wrote about our plans in this post about anchoring. Over the summer we can thrash out the details. First job will be to make a mock-up, of the changes to the bow roller, using plywood to give to the local fabricator as a template

The pullpit will probably sit on pads which will help keep water out, otherwise it won’t change. The anchor locker lid will be partly fixed and partly opening but it is starting to split open so will need some reinforcement/rebuilding.

Hopefully we have made some progress on getting a new toe rail fitted (was arranged for and paid for by the previous owner but still not fitted 2 years later).

No pictures, but we also removed two u-bolts from the cabin roof having discovered they were leaking a little over the winter. Once things have dried out we will replace any damaged core with thickened epoxy and not refit them.

I’ve also removed all the shrouds and tangs from the mizzen mast so that we can start on the dyneema replacements.

We have now made a detailed workplan now for fitting the chainplates in the aft cabin without causing to much disruption to our sleeping arrangements. Basically we will return home late at night after doing epoxy work so that we don’t have to move everything to sleep in the saloon. The marine ply is now ordered.

We have also ordered the “Ecor Pro DryBoat 12 DH1200 INOX 12 Litre Boat Dehumidifier” that we had planned on getting so that we can leave it on and hopefully ensure that nothing gets mouldy again. To fully achieve that will require us to finish the insulation and headlining but that can’t be done in the aft cabin until the chainplates are done and the mizzen mast support strengthened and the bed rearrangements completed. So a few weeks off.

As part of that we are preparing for a first fit of our new mains consumer unit. So far we have been using a camping unit but this will allow us to use more electrical things at the same time. Later it will be properly wired into Victron Multiplus units (see House Battery Bank: Should we go 48 Volt?) which will be connect to both a proper mains supply connection point and to the battery bank. We have gone for a large unit so every socket on the boat will have it’s own (appropriately sized) circuit breaker.

One slight gotcha was that by the end of this visit I’d used up my bandwidth for the month on my tablet (which also acts as a hotspot). Hadn’t really planned for 6.5 hours of zoom meetings, uploading edited video etc.

So a good amount done. In our next visit (weather permitting) we should start to see more things being created rather than removed 🙂