Rain and barbequed hand...

The weekend was predicted to be inclement weather so we decided it would be impossible to get the next coat of paint on the deck areas. There are still plenty of things needing to be done to get King Malu ready for sailing so we set to...

Saturday morning was taken up visiting the Raymarine dealer and working out best way to power the new chart plotter and autopilot, buying plumbing parts for the boat and Tim's and my houses and repairing a drain problem for my home. Well... real life has to continue as well as boat life!

We also went and measured the length of pipe needed to sort out the bilge pumps. We had been using two pumps with one way valves prior to a single run to the sea cock. Easy to fit because the pipe up to the sea cock was already there, but bad news because the one way valves kept sticking. So we purchased and replaced the pipe with new pipe separately from each bilge pump up to a Y piece at the top of the loop prior to the sea cock. The height of the loop was enough to mean the back pressure didn't come down the other pipe.

What I hadn't realized was how much the one way valves restricted the water flow. Suddenly we are getting much better emptying of the bilge.

Final task of the day, we fitted the new lights into the starboard side of the galley. There had been two circular lights and one fluorescent. We had changed it to one circular and one LED strip light. The circular light had also been changed to be a LED bulb. The old ceiling piece was now a new marine ply board, stained and varnished match the wood paneling.

So what was there to do? The strip light needed a voltage regulator and we had decided to run all the starboard lights off the one switch. This involved quite a bit of wiring. We're using liquid insulating tape and soldered joints. They should be more reliable but takes quite a bit of time.

When we had finally fixed it in place it was obvious that not only was the galley very much brighter, but we were using much less current that with the previous system. All in all a win-win situation... until... the new strip light went out. I suspected the voltage regulator so got it out of the plastic box and put my hand on to feel the temperature. Bad mistake. Barbecued hand. But at least the water was working so I could run my hand under the tap.

Eventually with some digging around with a meter I found that the battery charger was putting out more than 14 volts and so the regulator was having to drop 2 volts and discharge about 1watt as heat. The heat built up till the regulator switched itself off. OK, so what's the solution? A more powerful regulator to power all, or some of the lights.

Following morning Tim showed me a DC-to-DC converter for TVs he had found that supplies up to 5 amps constant 12 volts. I think the answer is to split the lighting into two circuits with two regulators supplying the stabilized voltage needed.

Sunday's task was to start the gangplank or passerelle.  Start, not finish because the epoxy needs time to set before the next stage. We need some pictures, but basically the construction is 9mm marine ply sandwiched with four strips of  2 x 1 (inches, that shows my english ambiguity on measuring both metric and imperial!) between them. First side done, leave to set and do second side Tuesday late afternoon.

There as a horrendous storm overnight so when we went to the boat today to get the old dashboard to make a new one we checked the bilges and the pump(s) had obviously been running overnight. How much water had they pumped out we wondered. We will get an hour counter to fit to the system so we can tell how much work they do while we are away and so get some idea of leaks into the boat.

It was good to see very little water in the saloon, obviously we are fixing most of the leaks now. Next weekend we decided to try to get the first of the Treadmaster down. That should reduce the leaks into the saloon even further and get the ceiling pieces out of the way in the aft cabin.

As we were walking to the boat Tim remarked that King Malu seemed to be lying askew. Strange. Eventually it appears that the whole floating dock has moved in the storm and all the boats are lying askew, it's just easier to see with a two masted ketch.

Paint and flies...

The weather is supposed to break and we will have rain at the weekend so I am trying to get the odd extra afternoon painting to complete the desk as soon as possible. I went down this afternoon with the intention of getting the second topcoat on the cockpit area.

Around the front of the mast is a sort of cowling with a flat sloping front. I had tried using a 'no-shed' mohair roller on all the flat pieces and found that no-shed meant 'doesn't shed after it has deposited all of the shedding hairs on the paint'. I couldn't help looking at it without thinking of Jacob's comment to Rebekah... no, not Jacob who helps with the boat, but in the Bible... he says 'My brother Esau is a hairy man...' Well, hairy man is OK, but hairy boat is not. So today, before starting the cockpit, I sanded down the cowl with 240 grit sandpaper and repainted.

It looked perfect.

Hmmm... in Arabic they have a phrase 'Only God is perfect'.

Then I started on the cockpit. The cockpit is fiddly and a pain, but it is looking nice now. I found that the cover for the sail locker had stuck and in unsticking a corner of the cover came away and will need re-fixing. Oh well... better now than on the high seas.

I had some paint left over so I went for'ard to paint the edge around the windlass locker. Then I noticed! It seemed like 250 flies had decided to make their coffin the cowl in front of the mast.

This photo was taken with the camera on my phone, so the very fact you can see all the flies is a testimony to how many there were. What I'm hoping is that when the paint has finally dried I will be able to very lightly re-sand it yet again and remove all their bodies. Hmmm... only God is perfect!

Painting all day

There have been some south-easterlies at the end of this week. Where King Malu is lying this means that she tends to lie even more to port than normal, pushed by the wind. She lies to port because when the previous owner added a generator he balanced the boat for one battery rather than the normal four.

I check the bilges every time we visit and today there was slightly more water in the bilges than normal. Strange, I thought. Last weekend one of the tasks we did was to repair the for'ard heads. In particular to re-epoxy the crack on the lid. For a normal toilet a cracked lid is no problem, but for a Blakes it stops it working totally as it needs to create a vacuum in the bowl with a seal to the seat and from the seat to the bowl.

When I went to inspect it, Jacob noticed there was water running into the bowl. Even stranger, I thought. But when I took a pace back, it stopped. A pace to port into the heads and it started again. Hmmm... and it was leaking slightly... into the bilges. So what was causing? It was obviously siphoning water in through the sea cock. But that should be impossible. In the Blakes instructions it shows a small hole at the top of the loop of pipe into the toilet to control the amount of water in the bowl (and implicitly to stop siphoning).

Ahhh... the previous owner had decided he knew better than Blakes and I found that he had taped up the hole making the inlet siphon water in whenever she lay very slightly to port. South-easterlies make he lie to port. She was siphoning while we were away and hence the bilges were fuller than normal.

The main target of the next few days is painting. Finish off the undercoat and do as much top coat as possible. So while I re-masked up the cockpit, Jacob sanded and cleaned the for'ard end around the windlass locker to paint that.

Yesterday afternoon I did some undercoating and today I completed all the undercoat on the cockpit and the main hatch.

Painting the bow deck will be slightly tricky since the mooring line comes in the starboard side. But if we do it in two halves I can bring the mooring line in over the bow roller since the anchor is not there and then tie it off on the port side.

We covered our nice new windlass with plastic sheet before Jacob painted the bow area, but now the bow is beginning to shine. Well, its clean in white now after Jacob's painting and will shine when there is a couple of top coats on it.

We have now completed, bar a small part on the starboard bow, the first undercoat for the deck as far back as the cockpit. So... hopefully tomorrow I will get first topcoat on the cockpit, second topcoat on the cockpit rim and complete the undercoat around the deck.

My target then is for Monday afternoon to do the second topcoat for the cockpit, completing the cockpit totally, and a second undercoat for the whole deck.

We have been putting plastic sheet over the cockpit hatch weighed down with anchor chain to keep it watertight, but that is inconvenient when you are trying to paint the cockpit rim.

So... Jacob and I put up the cockpit tent that his family brought back from the USA. That meant we could put away the plastic sheet and anchor chain which makes moving around on the cabin roof and painting a whole lot easier... and moving along the side decks a whole lot more difficult!

We've not got it quite right yet, but since it feels today that spring has come it was nice to have some shade to sit and eat our lunch under. The intention is to have a bimini and spray hood for the cockpit and this tent will then be for the fore deck over the spinnaker pole as extra shade.

In between all this I have been varnishing the ceiling pieces for the galley. Tim had suggested that since the marine ply was already mid toned we should use a slightly lighter stain/varnish than normal teak. That made good sense so I bought antique pine varnish as in the shop it looked the same colour as the teak varnish but slightly lighter. I have put three coats of stain/varnish on now and its still somewhat lighter than the teak. It may not matter for the galley ceiling pieces as they are low and won't be seen against the teak, but I think we probably do need teak stain/varnish for the for'ard cabin door.

Saturday, Valentines Day and Green Monday

This weekend was a long weekend here in Cyprus, culminating in what Tim calls Greek Monday. 'Well', he explains, 'we have Greek National Day, Greek Independence Day, Greek this day, Greek that day... I'm sure Green Monday is just a spelling mistake'. Whatever the reason it gave us an extra day off over the weekend.

The rain has meant that we haven't got as much painting done as we hoped but the weather held up over the weekend and was generally fine. In fact we ended up doing a lot of miscellaneous jobs.

I am reading two books by different authors about the Appalachian Trail. It's a very, very long footpath up the east coast of the USA. It takes many months to walk from end. Much like the time it is taking to prepare King Malu for sailing.

When discussing Bill Bryson's version of events my wife remarked that his account of preparing to go was more interesting than the journey itself... when it gets onto the actual walk in the woods it becomes boring. Sometimes I feel like preparing King Malu is a little like the exceedingly long hike along the Appalachian Trail. The preparation though not monotonous is taking many months!

We did actually complete a few jobs this weekend. Deep in the bowels of the boat is a very important pump. It's the pressure water pump for the fresh water system. The old pump had been there many years. It was a diaphram pump. The diaphragm was leaking by the time we have bought the boat. We possibly could have repaired it, but in reality it was time for a new pump.

So we took out the old, which was mounted on a plate in just the right place for your foot if you wanted to get to the back of the engine and mounted the new much smaller one on an upright plate that still allowed access to the gear box behind the engine. The electrics are being wired a new way, instead of traditional connector blocks (called 'choc blocks' because the first ones were brown and looked like chocolate blocks) we are soldering the wires together and then sealing with 'liquid insulating tape' which effectively makes the wires continuous.

Tim finished the other side of the water system - the sink drainage, allowing water to either go into the grey water tank or straight out to the sea. Last summer the Med was added as an IMO Appendix V area which meant the rules became stricter on discharge of waste water close to land.

It's amazing now to be able to turn on the tap and get water. May seem simple thing for living on land, but finishing both the inlet and outlet of the water system is a step forward.

The second task we worked on was installing the windlass (or anchor winch if you like). That has been an ongoing task. Having identified the old one as faulty, purchased a new one, fitted a block for it to rest on, and finally modified the hatch covers we were able to fix the new windlass in place, connect up the wires and test it. We won't be able to close the wiring panel and say 'It's finished' till the Treadmaster is down on the foredeck and the foot switches fitted permanently. I did tack on the foot switches and we tested the windlass. So that's another job almost complete.

Last week I also bought some more marine ply. This enabled two more small jobs to be completed: While King Malu had been on the hard she had been slightly down at the for'ard end, which meant that rain onto the main hatch cover flowed into the space above the saloon rather than away from it. It then pooled above the saloon slowly and gradually rotting its way through the cover. Eight years of rain left the this a sponge like rotting piece of wood. We hacked that out and have replaced it with a new piece of marine ply which we glued in with Sikaflex and will then seal with epoxy paint and glue.

The sun had its effect on the hatch cover itself, warping the teak and bowing it till it no longer ran true. Even before we bought the boat one of the side rails to the hatch cover had been removed as it had detached from the hatch cover itself. So, we kept the side rails and front and replaced the hatch cover itself with a new piece of marine ply. We had discussed how to finish it. Should we varnish or should we paint? Because of the damage to the side rails over years of use which needed filling we will paint it. Painting it with white Awlgrip will make it more reflective to the sun. Almost all the time you are on the boat, the hatch cover is open so you won't see and miss a varnished hatch cover anyway.

We had taken down the ceiling pieces above the galley to fit new lights. As mentioned earlier we are changing over to LED lights. The current used is very much lower. We can almost run the entire boat lights for the same consumption as one or two of the old lights. We have new strip lights for either side of the galley. Since the current consumption is so much lower we would have liked to have them all on one switch. We have found a way to make each side on a separate switch but not combine them to a single galley switch. The old wood was warped and slightly tatty so we glued the strip lights to new pieces of marine ply which we will stain and varnish to match the teak of the saloon.

We glued the new white strip light above the chart table. We changed the round light to take a red light and will have a bright white strip light alongside that. What I am now looking for is a replacement switch for the round light that will be centre off, so I can wire it one way for red and the other way for white.

Finally we did a big clean down of the deck ready for painting... well... not quite finally... we checked the bilges having changed batteries to charge another one for a friend and found that the automatic bilge pump was working and not working at the same time. By that I mean the switch made the pump start but although it pumped and made a noise, no water was coming out. We traced this eventually to both one way valves being stuck. Now these two are replacement valves for others that had been faulty earlier.

I can believe one valve or type pf valve faulty, but four faulty suggests something else.How we have plumbed it is with the two pumps (main and backup) each going through a one way valve into a y-piece combiner then up a single pipe looped over into a further combiner and out to the sea. The head of water sitting on the one way valve is approximately two metres and so I am thinking that the back pressure of two metre head of water wedges the one way valve making it stick next time you want to use it. Also turning on one bilge pump will add pressure to the other one way valve wedging it further.

So what to do about it? We wanted to have one way valves near the bottom of the system to try to stop the back flow of two metres of water in the pipe. Maybe we will just have to put up with this and if we want one way valves, have them closer to the final loop and combiner.

All in all an enjoyable and profitable holiday weekend. Now if the weather holds maybe we can finish the deck painting this week/next weekend.

Loads of little jobs, including the windlass

Today we tackled a plethera of small jobs including the windlass, well especially the windlass. Fitting the new windlass has been an ongoing issue. First we had to build the block to lift it up for the right angle, then it became too high for the locker. So... today we cut a hole in the locker and made a cover out of marine ply to cover the hole so that the windlass could work a few cm higher.

Cutting the hole in the locker was a job and a half. I did one half, Tim the other. When he was cutting he stopped for a moment and remarked, 'You know how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Well, cutting a hole on a Nicholson is the same, one millimeter at a time!' Nicholsons really are very solid boats and cutting any sort of hole takes a lot of effort.

Tim also removed the piece of marine ply that had rotted over the companionway hatch. Now that may seem ironic that one place its difficult to cut a whole and elsewhere it has rotted. The cause of the rot was that over the eight years King Malu was on the hard she settled for'ard down by a good few centimetres. This meant that all the water that should run out of the companionway hatch actually ran into the hatch... and thus rotted it.

We also glued in place battens for mounting the shelf for the domestic batteries and battens for mounting the water pump for the fridge/freezer. When they are set solid [next weekend] then we can mount the pumps and the shelf. Whenever we get any epoxy left over we fill any dings in the deck ready for laying the Treadmaster.

We also worked on the ceiling pieces above the galley. These have warped and will need replacing. They had to come down anyway to mount the new strip LED lights. So we measured up all the marine ply we will need in the next few weeks... replacing the for'ard heads door, these ceiling pieces, the hatch cover etc.

Whether the weather...

I was designing the lighting for a theatre show this morning so Tim went down without me. Our hope, well, my hope, had been that we should get the Treadmaster layed on the saloon deck this weekend. That was not to be. Tim made the template for the port side and the aft end of the saloon roof and when I arrived we together made the template for the starboard side. Actually, Tim had done more than 90% of the work already as the starboard is almost a mirror image of the port side.

The templates were made out of thin cardboard bought from a stationers. Then around the dorades Tim measured and then cut out with a compass. The template around the dorades were then placed in position and the template proper created. The edges were made using double sided table and masking tape to created a flat and accurate cutting template. It's a painfully detailed job and took Tim most of the morning.

Only having half of the afternoon didn't really give us enough time to cut and lay the Treadmaster. Also driving down to the marina I remembered that we needed to fill holes the dorade mounts and then paint them before laying the Treadmaster.

So... the weather... can't we just do it tomorrow?

Sadly the weather is bad for the next 10 days.

We really need a few clear days for the paint to dry on the dorades before we can lay the Treadmaster. In a normal spring/summer/autumn week it would be odds on that we would get that. But this winter its been rain and rain and rain and rain. Which is useful for the reservoirs but not for a major refit on a yacht!

Ken came down and fitted the new water pump and the exhaust. Both should have been trivial... OK, the exhaust is in a difficult to get to place, so maybe not trivial... but both had problems due to the thread in the engine block not holding firm on one bolt on each ot the appendages.

Discussion about the solution ensued. I had used Epidermix epoxy on my dinghy to create a 'thread' for a bolt to hold the blocks for the genoa and so suggested using that. Alternative to that was using Pratley's Putty, which is also an epoxy. The problem with using an epoxy on a bolt would be that it would be stuck firm for all eternity. And there was a question if it would be stuck firm under the heat of the engine... Then we realised if we stuck in a stud we could use a nut on the end and it wouldn't matter it was stuck for all eternity. Then... Ken tried a stud and found that being longer than the bolt it worked very well on the end of the thread that the bolt had previously not reached. Brilliant. Just quite a few hours to get there!

Oh, and Tim and I also removed most of the blue 3M masking tape from the the portholes and other masked areas. That took a huge amount of time as it had stuck fast and the paint was holding it even firmer.

More paint, more painting...

Yesterday evening I went down to King Malu to do the second coat for part of the interior of the saloon. My target for the week is to complete the interior painting for the saloon and the exterior for the cabin room at both the for'ard and aft ends.

In the saloon I removed the drop cloths where I didn't need to paint anymore. Sadly some of the lacquer paint hadn't adhered as well as I had hoped and came off with the masking tape. I will retouch with an art brush sometime.

We have used almost completely the two litre packs of Awlgrip undercoat (a two litre pack makes between 4.5 and 5 litres of paint, since you add hardener and reducer to the mix. We will need another 1 litre pack, so I called Haris at Ocean Marine today and it will be shipped overnight so is here in the morning.

I had intended masking and painting the undercoat on the very back of the stern cabin roof, recoating tomorrow morning and then top coat late afternoon, final coat on Saturday so we could lay Treadmaster on Sunday. But it was soooo cold today when I went down today that I gave up on that idea. We will hopefully get Treadmaster down on the saloon/for'ard cabin roof over the weekend but not the stern cabin.

The reason for the push is that when it rains we get water coming into the cabins which I really want to stop.

Anyhow, this afternoon I went down to King Malu and I did complete the second topcoat for the saloon/for'ard cabin roof and a first topcoat around the cockpit.

I haven't worked out one problem. The roller - which is a decent mohair roller - sheds hairs for the first few minutes of use. The paint is so expensive you don't want to waste it, yet the hairs really almost spoil the surface. I read online about 'shed resistant mohair rollers' but there is a choice of one roller here so it's not easy to get really decent paint brushes and rollers.