Another adventure begins

 After a frenetic couple of weeks of sorting, packing and transporting, we have moved back aboard Maunie for another big trip. The house, garden and, most importantly, Bertie the cat, are in the care of our friends Paul and Tracey who have taken up residence, along with Huxley the Labrador, and we're re-adjusting to life aboard Maunie.

The plan for the next three months is to re-trace some of our track of last summer - up to the west coast of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides. However, this year we want to spend a reasonable chunk of time in the Hebrides before (weather and time permitting) sailing to Orkney and then round the NE corner of Scotland, down to Inverness and through the Caledonian Canal (which links into Loch Ness) to Fort William before returning home.

'Weather permitting' is, of course, an important proviso in such plans and it hasn't started terribly well, to be honest. This week's forecast is for very gentle winds - this is tomorrow's chart:

However, we have learned to be optimistic and to search for little weather windows and our first sail today, 32nm from the Dart to the River Yealm, was a good example. We fully expected to have to motor the whole passage but managed a really lovely hour with the spinnaker flying.

In the River Yealm on a drizzly evening

The whole visitors' pontoon to ourselves

So, we'll take each day as it comes and hope that normal south-westerlies will return early next week to send us north up the Irish Sea. We'll update this blog as and when we can.

Afloat and planning new adventures

We are very pleased to report that Maunie is safely back in the water! The insurance survey, carried out the week before launching, went really well and we were impressed with our surveyor, Nick Vass, who was hugely knowledgeable and helpful. Needless to say, he really liked Maunie! We haven't received his report yet but he gave us a good verbal review - a couple of minor issues but otherwise the boat got a big thumbs up.

The last winter job before relaunch was to plug a rather large hole in the bottom of the hull. We'd removed the seacocks, which allow cooling water to be pumped to the engine and generator, since it was 10 years since we'd replaced the originals with good quality bronze fittings. The seacocks are actually a trio of fittings - a skin fitting which bolts through the fibreglass hull, a ball valve which screws into the skin fitting and can be shut in the unlikely event of a water hose failing, and a strainer which filters out any weed or other debris to prevent it being sucked into the cooling water pumps.

We'd realised at the end of last season that the ball valve for the engine had failed - the handle turned but too easily - clearly the valve was stuck, luckily in the half-open position so we could still use the engine. This was obviously a major safety concern, so removing and replacing the skin fittings and valves was a must-do job on our winter list. 

Three seacocks with water-strainers. Left to right, they supply the generator, engine and water-maker with salt water. The valve handles are in the closed position here.

The engine strainer, ball valve and skin fitting. The easiest way to remove it was to cut the outside of the skin fitting off and push it upwards through the hull.

The broken ball-valve. Still partly open even though the handle is in the closed position - not good!

The generator strainer is polished up and the new valve and skin fitting test-fitted, ready to go back into the boat.

Everything refitted and ready for launch. 

It's very important to bed the skin fittings with plenty of sealant!

Of course, we filmed a short video of the process for those who just love a technical video! https://youtu.be/nNf30nQZj_c

Launch day, last Tuesday, all went very smoothly though it was an early start to catch the tide.

Last chance for underwater checks before we launch

Ready for the hour's motor down river to the mooring

Maunie is pretty much ready to go now, with all the sails fitted. We'll aim to get down to her early next week for a test sail and to add various bits of kit that are still at home. Amongst the items to go back aboard is our Icom long-range SSB radio that was such a wonderful thing as we crossed the Pacific. Our record distance for boat-to-boat voice communications was nearly 5,000 miles when we were in New Zealand and our friends Ana & Colin were approaching the coast of Chile. 

We don't use the SSB much in UK waters - the normal VHF radio (with a range of perhaps 20 miles) plus mobile phones are easier to use - but we felt it was time to give the machine a bit of tlc. The metal case had become a bit rust-spotted in places (it sits near the main companionway) so we took it off, removed all the paint, cleaned the metal to remove any traces of rust and gave it six coats of spray paint. 

A satisfyingly chunky bit of kit. The radio is about 25 years old so has lots of knobs and buttons to play with - it now looks as good as new.

So the plan? We're aiming to be back aboard at the beginning of May for another Scottish adventure. Stay tuned for more news, as they say in radio circles.

Winter Jobs - Part 4

The moment when we put Maunie back into the water is very near - next Tuesday, in fact! So we've been busy finishing the main winter maintenance jobs and have started to reload the boat with sails and cruising kit. 

Having re-faced the floors, which now look wonderful, some of the surrounding woodwork looked distinctly tatty in contrast, the worst offender being the door into the forward cabin. It became clear that, when the door was originally fitted, the bottom edge had been planed to fit but no protective varnish had been applied. As a result, damp had penetrated the facing veneer and it had stated to lift and flake:

We took the decision to strip off a section of the damaged surface, apply a veneer patch (in order to get a level surface) and then apply a single sheet of teak veneer to the whole door:

The old veneer was scored with a knife and a sharp chisel was used to remove the veneer. The metal rule clamped across the surface was there to prevent the chisel going too far!

Applying veneer patches

Carefully applying a single sheet of veneer, making sure we didn't trap any air bubbles. The veneer had a coating of adhesive already applied so it was a case of peeling back the protective plastic coating progressively as we moved up the door

Very pleased with the results, after an application of wood stain and six coats of varnish. Just the door handle and hinges to refit.

The suppliers of the veneer really liked the photos and the video that we sent them so Graham has produced a version for their website, complete with their logos, which will appear soon. The original video is here: https://youtu.be/HFMF4y5ltfk

The short warm spell a couple of weeks ago was the ideal opportunity to remove Maunie's winter covers and refit her sails and sprayhood:

In all it took us a couple of hours but there's a 2-minute time-lapse of the process here: https://youtu.be/9qMadkpK3gg

The full boat condition survey, required by the insurance company, took place on Thursday and, as we'd hoped, the surveyor was very happy with Maunie so we're all ready to launch.

Of course, we'll never run out of boat jobs but another important one was to look after a rather smaller boat, our inflatable tender. During the sailing season it's stored in the Kinsgwear 'toast rack' where dinghies stand upright on their transoms (Blunt ends!) between metal hoops - just like slices of toast in a toast rack. Exposed to the elements, especially the degrading UV of bright sunshine, many of the boats look pretty worn out but we always put a cover on ours so, at 15 years old it still looks remarkably good:

However, our covers have been made using £25 sheets of "UV Resistant" woven plastic waterproof sheeting which we have found last only one season. Not a very sustainable solution, we thought, so we utilised some left-over boat cover material (off-cuts from our cockpit dodgers project of a couple of years ago) plus some new, long-life Sunbrella (it's fully waterproof and the light colour will reflect the heat of the sun prevent the dinghy baking inside it on hot days) to make a cover that should last 10 years or so. A long zip that we cut from a damaged cover that we found in a skip in New Zealand (we love a good boatyard skip!) completed the components so out came the trusty Sailrite sewing machine.

Bertie helps with the measurements! The old and damaged plastic cover is used as a template

The boat stands upright on the ends of the two outer tubes so the cover is open at the bottom for good airflow to prevent mould.

If all goes to plan, our next update will be on the water - we can't wait!

Winter Boat Jobs, Part 3

We're making good progress with the jobs list. The major achievement last week was to rejuvenate the tatty-looking floorboards in the galley and fore cabin.

Fore cabin: Before.....

.....and after

Galley: Before....

...and After.

Here's a quick video to give you an idea of what was involved over two and a half days:

We are really pleased with the results, though it was a fairly stressful project. There's a more detailed version on YouTube if you want to see the full fun and games - click HERE

There's more flooring to do, of course, so we'll share some photos of the finished results aboard the boat at a later date.

Today's project has been another fiddly but important job. Our sprayhood (which is now 13 years old) has been exposed to strong UV in the Tropics and we've already done a few running repairs but this was a chance to give it some proper TLC.

The sprayhood gets the Sailrite sewing machine treatment. The white strips on the floor are the backing paper from double-sided tape used to secure the binding before sewing. 

 We've added new binding to all the edges and also to the main seams so we hope it'll have a few more years of life left in it, particularly when we've given it a detail clean and a coat of magic conditioner and water-proofer called Renovo once it's back on Maunie. 

Winter Jobs Part 2

Modifying the aft section of Maunie's winter cover, to fit around the legs of the solar panel arch, was quite a challenge but we've added zips with velcro'd storm flaps so the boat is now beautifully protected from the elements. Meanwhile the work on various projects that we can complete at home continues; we thought we'd share some with you on the grounds that (a) fellow boat owners might find them vaguely useful and (b) watching other people at work is always a good reason for having a tea-break yourself.

Polishing the Fuel

You may remember reading that our engine fuel filter suddenly blocked and the engine died as we motored south through the Irish Sea last July. Contaminated fuel is a real worry with diesel engines so there are two in-line filters, the first 10-micron and the second 2-micron, to prevent debris or water reaching the fine-tolerances of the high pressure diesel metering pump and the injector nozzles. We obviously had some dirt in the fuel so the first filter did its job but there remained the worry of what might be lurking at the bottom of the fuel tank. Any water that gets into the diesel (even from condensation on the tank walls) sinks to the bottom and the interface between it and the fuel can be a breeding ground for a gloopy microbial growth known as Diesel Bug, a problem exacerbated because diesel now includes a proportion of hydroscopic bio-fuel.

We therefore decided to build a Fuel Polisher - a pump and filter system that sucks fuel from the bottom of the tank, filters it to remove any water, debris or diesel bug and then returns the clean diesel to the top of the tank.

This is the finished design - we went for a portable device so that we can clean both of Maunie's tanks and can also easily transfer and clean any fuel that we bring aboard in jerrycans.

The schematic of the components

The finished device

There's a short video of the building and testing process (where we purposefully poured water into diesel to see how well it would work) HERE

Re-varnishing the table

The last time Maunie's dining table was given a coat of varnish was seven years ago, in New Zealand: 

It's coped remarkably well with heavy use since then but was definitely ready for some TLC  so we removed it from its pole (another story of extended 'it's a boat!' challenges!) to bring it home. We were able to strip off many layers of varnish and get it looking really good, eventually. 

A supposedly easy process didn't go exactly to plan (it nearly sent Graham round the bend)  but we are very pleased with the final results. There's another short video of the process, ideal for those who like to watch paint dry, HERE

So, two important jobs are ticked off the list and we start on the next - rejuvenating Maunie's floors and replacing some seacocks. More updates to follow, bet you can't wait!

Winter Boat Jobs, Part 1

With Maunie safely ashore and nicely wrapped up in her winter covers, we are taking the opportunity to work through some winter jobs. Many are just routine maintenance - oil and filter changes on the engine and generator, flushing their cooling systems through with antifreeze and draining down the fresh water system, for example. However, we are also bringing bits and pieces home to work on; in particular we have taken the more easily-removed items of woodwork from the cabins to sand and re-varnish. It's also a great chance to sort a few niggling things that we've not yet addressed; this little project is a good example:

This small panel sits beside the main companionway. The black box with the rotary knob is a long-defunct, 12v dimmer switch for the pilothouse cabin lights and the cheap rocker switch above it has become corroded; it's been annoying us for a while so it's definitely more than time that we replaced them.

The problem, of course, is that the veneered plywood panel was left full of holes once the switches were removed. Buying a small piece of marine plywood of the right thickness and surface finish proved tricky, so the solution was to get some new teak veneer to re-face the existing wood, before fitting a new and rather sleeker switch:

The veneer we chose has a self-adhesive backing so applying it was pretty straightforward.

It needed a stain to try to match the colour before we added a few coats of satin varnish but we are very pleased with the final result.

Illuminated push-switch fitted, the panel is ready to go back to Maunie

There are plenty of similar jobs to be done this winter but each one brings the boat back into fine fettle. Other tasks on our to-do list include:

Refinishing the floorboards - probably applying a laminate teak-and-holly stripe-effect surface, rather than re-varnishing the worn and stained wood surface.

Running repairs to the sprayhood to extend its life for a few more years

Cleaning the upholstery

Re-varnishing the saloon table

Re-varnishing cabin doors and bulkheads

Cleaning and repainting the insides of lockers and bilges

Getting the gas system professionally checked and certified

Updating our safety systems, with the liferaft requiring its 3-year professional inspection and service and our lifejacket emergency beacons just returned after servicing and the fitment of new long-life batteries.

It's all part of the fun of boat ownership, they say, but it keeps us busy!

Nearing the end of the season, with a tour of Britannia Royal Naval College

We've just had a few days aboard Maunie in beautiful sunny weather. Not much wind at all, however, so the plan to have a last sail came to naught. Still, we had some excellent walking up the Dart Valley, managed to strip the sails off boom and fore-stay furler in perfect (dry and windless) conditions and completed a few more maintenance jobs. In a couple of week's time we are hauling out for the winter.

Yesterday, our final day aboard, was the highlight of the week; we'd booked to go on a private tour of the Britannia Royal Naval College with another 28 south-west members of the cruising association. The tour had been postponed from last year, due to Covid, but we were very glad it was; our patience was rewarded with bright, warm, sunshine and a unique spectators' view of a normally very private Royal Navy ceremony.

BRNC, designed by Sir George Aston Webb (also responsible for the facade of Buckingham Palace) and completed in 1905

All Royal Navy Officers (and many from navies around the world) are trained here - they complete two, fifteen-week terms of intense training before their Passing Out ceremony to become commissioned officers. 

By pure chance, our tour took place on the day of the Fleet Commander's Supersession Ceremony. The Fleet Commander is the operational head of the British Navy, reporting to the First Sea Lord, who is the most senior-ranking British Naval Officer. The retiring FC, Vice Admiral Jerry Kyd (who has the unique track record of being captain of three RN aircraft carriers, Ark Royal, Illustrious and Queen Elizabeth) was handing over to Vice Admiral Andy Burns, with a full guard of honour. 

We felt somewhat conspicuous as a bunch of civilians in the place but the Vice Admirals and the First Sea Lord came over to chat to us before and after the formal ceremony and were friendly and welcoming.

There was a lot of saluting going on, so we soon realised that this was an important event

The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Anthony Radakin comes over for a chat

The Officer Cadets fall in to bid farewell to Vice Admiral Jerry Kyd

With the ceremony completed we were able to continue our tour of the college, led by a very knowledgeable retired officer.  

The Chapel

The Dining Hall

Maunie's mooring is just to the left of the mast

Anyone who has visited Birmingham University (another of Aston Webb's designs) will recognise the architectural style

Cadets completing ceremonial swordsmanship training for their Passing Out Parade