Water, water everywhere...

I'm generally the owl and Tim generally the lark. So for him to find me at the boat by 7am this morning was a shock to the system. He and Mark arrived a few minutes after me... having bet each other that I would not be there before them. Had they actually bet, Mark would have been the richer.

Why so early? Well, the weather this weekend has been terrible. Rain, rain, thunder, lightening, rain and more rain... the forecast for today was that the best of the weather would be before 11am. And the forecast was correct.

The good news is that all the grinding off the old ant-fouling is complete. Tim has had his last hot red shower. Yes, you did read that right, not a red hot shower, but a hot red shower... the old Jotun anti-fouling was red and got everywhere. Even wearing a mask and goggles it in most places. Now that is complete.

We also completed the grinding off of the old Treadmaster glue. There is a little work to do sanding round the edges, but that is all gone. We vacuumed and cleaned off what we could but lets hope the rain washes it away, since the glue becomes a solid cement like substance when it gets wet, dries and is hardened by the sun.

I also managed to sand down the grey band along both sides of the hull ready for painting. The intention had been to do the first two coats Monday and Tuesday, and third coat Friday. But the rain is set for Monday and Friday so I hope to do them Tuesday through Thursday. But... we found an extra task to add the the list and the order will have to be changed both because of the rain. How come? Well, having removed the grab handles and toast racks we had put gaffer tape over the holes. But this didn't stop the water coming through!

Not only there, but there were drips from somewhere else on the cabin roof. This is our first time with rain and King Malu. We removed more of the ceiling panels and discovered a rotting panel under the main hatch. Putting a screwdriver through this rooting marine ply panel was like opening a tap! Ahhh... the boat has settled slightly for'ard over eight years and so any water from the cockpit seating runs into the runners for the main hatch. Because it has settled for'ard the water then runs into the space above the main hatch and sits there as a pond on this marine ply board. Over eight years the wood has rotted.

Today before we left we put up a plastic tent over the boom to try to reduce the amount of water running into this space and thence into the saloon.

So apart from all the grinding, what else has happened this week? We had two deliveries of supplies. One from Limassol and one from the UK. I had a meeting this week in Limassol so collected all the paints from Ocean Marine and brought them back to Larnaka.

The second from the UK came from MailSpeedMarine.com and they certainly lived up to their name, for speed that is. They have an amazing deal on at the moment for a 2.7 metre inflatable dinghy as a tender for yachts. It's only 299 GBP. They said they could arrange delivery to Cyprus included within that price. To both Tim's and my amazement that was delivery overnight by UPS. They have won a customer, with service like that we will buy from them again.

The engine... well that was not so good news sadly. Ken came down on Saturday morning with new injector valves and spent a couple of hours fitting them and sorting everything out for a test run. This happened about mid day. The engine turned over, coughed, spluttered and died. Quite a few times. There was fuel leaking from the injector pump, but that probably didn't cause it to not run, so Ken has gone away to think.

However, with all the grinding off finished, we feel we have turned the corner. From dismantling and grinding to rebuilding and painting. A step forward.