[Kyle]Well, we couldn't put it off any longer. The time for our planned haul-out, which had just become a much bigger animal, was fast approaching. Upon arriving at
The Boat Works, the first thing we did was tie up to one of their floating slips for a night. This gave us the chance to start scoping out the various tradespeople we would need (known in Australia as “tradies”, of course). We also had organized both a surveyor and the trave-lift operator to come and inspect Begonia to see if our bulkhead damage would be an issue with the lift. Both agreed that the damage was minor enough not to be a factor (whew!). We had some engine guys come out so that we could get a jump on any necessary part orders and had a steel guy come to talk to us about both our steering and bimini issues. As a bonus, he ground some of the damage from our rudder posts which would have kept them from being unshipped for repairs.
Our water system was down to its last few liters, so we needed to add some. I don't generally like being unnecessarily heavy for a haul-out, so we normally only take on what we think we will need, plus a small reserve. Since we had no idea how long we would be out of the water and since the hose water at the hardstands is non-potable, I decided to fill both tanks, which comes to 512kilos (1,126lbs).
Haul out means the work begins FULL-ON
We don't want to be a day longer in the yard than we really need
Boat yards are always a miserable place to be. They are grubby and noisy and by design are that part of boating that is no fun at all. To their credit, The Boat Works seems to understand this and, while not being able to change the underlying purpose of the facility, do seem to go to a lot of effort to mitigate much of the discomfort. Our hardstand was on clean concrete, which minimized the grubby footprints problem significantly. Every boat also gets a proper set of hefty metal stairs for boarding, complete with a handrail. This seems like a small thing, but when you are carrying heavy stuff up and down all day, it sure beats using an old ladder you found in the lumber pile in the corner of the yard. There are also covered benches (seats) and workbenches behind the boats with vises where you can dismantle and pry at things out of either the glare of the sun or the pouring rain. They even put in a few trees to make it seem just a little less industrial. It's still necessary to hike to the facilities every time you need to go, but their toilet/shower rooms are all private, which surely beat army barracks-style. Best of all, they have free laundry and courtesy cars on the chuck-some-gas-in-it honor system.
The whole compound has almost every type of tradie a boatie could need, plus two restaurants and even a new barber shop. Since we had so very much work to be done and on so many different areas of the boat, we hired a small shipping container, into which we could empty almost all of Begonia's contents. We even took the covers off of everything but the bed and main settee so the guts of the boat were all easily accessible at the same time.
Then we took a deep breath and the work started. There was SO much to be done. Our list of jobs, which was being managed by Maryanne, started at over three hundred items, with the various tradies being responsible for the half that required big tools or a separate workshop. Over the course of our time there, we added another hundred or so tasks as we discovered anything we didn't like during our deep dive into Begonia's systems. That knocked almost as many nice-to-have items off of the list, but in the end, Begonia received her most comprehensive refurbishment since we have had her, maybe even since she first left the factory. {Maryanne: Actually, we cancelled many of this year's haul-out plans to make way (time and money-wise) for the repairs needed after the Tweed Head Bar incident - so we have more still for next time!}
The tradies portion of our list was our first problem. Since the COVID pandemic has hit the world, international travel has really plummeted. Since Australia hasn't been hit too badly by the illness itself, a lot of Australians have decided to stay at home and enjoy their beautiful country along with us foreign visitors. It seems that a lot of them have usual vacation money burning holes in their pockets, so they are buying boats (and caravans and new cars and home extensions) at unprecedented rates. If they can't go to Bali this Spring, they'll buy a boat and go sailing this Spring.
This means that every single tradie in or near The Boat Works has more work than they could ever want. They have so much work, in fact, that it's hard for them to find the time at night to deal with correspondence and billing as well. Getting the attention of any tradie is like being a patient of the best surgeon in the state. If they tell you the only time they can see you is in the middle of your wedding, Telling them it's a bad time is not an option. You reschedule the wedding.
This is where Maryanne really shines. Maryanne's whole purpose in life while hauled-out is to tick things off of the list. Some of it, she does herself. Others become my jobs. A tradie who has ignored too many emails in a row can end up with her showing up at their shop and dragging them back to the boat with her while I toil away at my assigned task. After a while, they all got to know her as Manager of the project. Guys would show up, look over my shoulder and ask, “Where's Maryanne?” We dealt with so many tradies and saw so many different faces that it was hard to keep everybody straight. I often found myself looking over my own shoulder with the same question. When she arrived, my common refrain became, “Oh, thank God you are here!”, followed by something like, “This guy says he's here for something about the gelcoat” and a shrug. She would then take over, take the guy to the relevant part of the boat and start explaining what needs to be done to him while I went back to my previous task.
Almost all of the tradies we hired (seventeen different companies) did good work that was to a better standard than Maryanne or I would have managed, especially for technical stuff we don't do so often, or those things that require a couple of strong guys with way better tools than we can fit on the boat. They ran the range from showing up mostly when they said to reliably letting us down every time.
Our worst offender was the company who was fabricating our replacement davits. It took weeks to make it to the top of their list. When we did, it was at the end of the day. They quickly determined the job couldn't be done in a day, so they would come back tomorrow, which they didn't do for three more days. When we did finally start getting daily visits, it was always just before quittin' time. “We'll be back tomorrow”, repeat. Every time they showed up, they would spend ages grinding and welding and drilling as if they were engineering the job from scratch, then they would take everything to the shop to be modified. “See you tomorrow.” Show up at 3pm. Start from scratch – again. One fun moment was when they and another tradie company who was also less than punctual were required to be aboard Begonia at the same time, as both of their jobs required coordination with each other before moving on. Each one would wait five minutes, decide they are too busy to stay longer and then take off, not to be seen again for the rest of the day. That's fine, the other guy never showed up anyway. It took Maryanne days to get them standing on deck next to each other. By then, one had undone the other's work, so they had some stuff to hash out between them.
Then there was the guy who did almost zero work (known as fuck-all in British), who eventually had Maryanne do almost his entire job before marking it as his own and then having the temerity to bill us for it. Oh, the money was flying out fast. I felt like Oprah Winfrey, walking through the boat yard and yelling to all of the tradies, “You get a pool, and you get a pool, and YOU get a pool...” Ugh!
My personal favorite tradie was a guy named Tarik. One of the haul-out jobs we had originally planned to do before the Tweed Bar incident was to replace both sail drive diaphragms. It's a big job that requires unbolting the associated engines, among other things. The last time we tried to do the job in Whangarei, NZ before sailing to Chile, the mechanic there found a couple of bolts that were so tight, we were worried that they were seized. Digging them out and glassing in new threaded plates for them would have required way too much time. Since the diaphragms were in good condition, we decided to reassemble what was there and leave it for another haul-out. Now enough time had passed that we were going to need to suck it up and do the job no matter how long it took.
The thick rubber diaphragm and its slightly thinner companion, the backup diaphragm, are critical parts of the boat. They are essentially a section of the hulls which is flexible to allow for the vibration of the engine and drive. They do wear out, albeit slowly, and if one failed, the subsequent hole would be more than big enough to overwhelm every pump on the boat. The replacement job is not technically difficult, but since it is extremely important to do it right and since I have never done it before, we decided that it was one of those jobs that would be worth paying an experienced expert to do.
Well, sort of. When we got the estimate, Maryanne decided we should maybe just pay for one so I could see how it's done, then I could do the other. I wasn't so sure, but I agreed to remain open to the idea until I saw it done.
So, when the day arrived at only slightly later than the appointed time, I readied myself to squeeze into the starboard engine compartment with a couple of beer-bellied, middle-aged guys to see how it was done. Who showed up instead was Tarik, who is exactly half as many guys, and he looked to be about half the expected age, and with no beer-belly to be seen. Where are my grizzled old experts? This is the kid they send to make and then subsequently patch an eight-inch hole in the boat? He even arrived on a bicycle.
Once he got into the engine compartment, he sure looked like he knew what he was doing. That must be extra hard with the owner hovering about, watching your every move. I peppered him with questions, to most of which I already knew the answers. He nailed every one and taught me a bunch of stuff I didn't know. Then, like a good and patient teacher, he walked me through the whole process, making sure I understood each step before moving on. He focused especially about what to do at various trouble spots and was full of good tips gleaned from his experience, like stick a 2x4 under the engine to take the weight so it doesn't fall over when the sail drive is disconnected. Then, with nary a grunt, he picked up the 40kg (88lb) drive assembly and wiggled it around until the big end at the prop shaft came through the hole, then set it down next to me.
”THAT'S EASY!!!”, I shouted, quoting Michael Palin's line as Sir Galahad in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. I realized on the last syllable that this movie came out WAY before Tarik was even born, so there was a chance he may miss the reference. If he did, he didn't let on. He said he would take the drive to the shop and disassemble it after lunch.
Okay, the job will take a little longer with our tools, but I'm confident I can do it now. Then Maryanne won the day by asking Tarik if he wouldn't mind letting me use his tools while he was at lunch. Now, you've got to understand, tools are a mechanic's livelihood and most have to buy their own. It was clear that Tarik was spending a good portion of his pay on top-quality tools. Without hesitation, he said, “No problem. Bring them to the shop when you are done.” and left $1,000 worth of tools behind for me to use. I had been planning on tackling the port sail drive soon, but not necessarily today. Now I had to do as much as I could during lunch!
Thirty minutes later, I arrived at the shop with not only the returned tools, but also part of the port drive that I couldn't get apart. The rest was on the workbench behind Begonia. Tarik's big impact driver made short work of the bolts that had worried us in Whangarei. They came out clean, but really hot!
Using the starboard drive as an example, Tarik walked me through disassembly and removal of the prop shaft. It looked easy enough, but I just couldn't get the shaft and its associated gear out of the drive housing. Both parts are machined to very high tolerances and getting them misaligned with each other while trying to slide them apart can actually jam them together. I've had the same problem on the top end before, but have always been able to resolve it. I figured a more experienced hand would know better how to finesse the part free.
Tarik tried and got stuck in the same spot. Maybe it wasn't me after all. Then his boss, Rob, put the whole drive in a big vise and started whacking it with a big sledgehammer. Oh, I can't bear to watch!
When the thing finally came free, Rob took a look inside the housing and said, “There's your problem.” He pointed to a little miniature wave of aluminum that had been shaved out of the housing by the outside of the adjacent gear, blocking it from being removed. As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was. Back in Mexico in 2017, our transmission had failed when the internal pin connecting the shift lever and the actual gears sheared. I retrieved most of it, but at the time there was one small piece that I couldn't find. It was now gone, probably with the oil on one of the subsequent oil changes, but at some point, it had bounced its way through the oil galleries to that gear where it scoured that little wave. We were very lucky. Had it jammed between gears instead, it would have seized the whole drive, causing all sorts of expensive damage to both it and the engine. Maryanne and I decided to leave the port drive with Rob and Tarik to inspect and repair as necessary. So much for our savings from only having them do the one side.
I picked up both newly refurbished drives a week and a half later and took them back to Begonia for painting. After a couple of coats, Tarik said he would be over the next morning to install the starboard one. Again, I wasn't planning on doing “my” side just yet, but I wanted to beat him to it, so I rearranged my jobs list to do it first thing. I managed to have the whole drive installed and connected to the engine before he showed up. Tarik did his side in half the time it took me, and then was nice enough to inspect my work while I looked at his. It looked the same to me. He reported the same and we both agreed they were both properly done jobs. He still had a few more minor things to do, but the big task was done. At one of these subsequent visits, we learned that our engine guru was not in fact in his twenties, he's really eighteen. Eighteen! You'd never know it by watching him work.
As a Thank You, we gave him a couple of gift certificates at the place in the yard where Maryanne and I buy our lunches when we are too busy to make our own, which is most days. We later learned that instead of feeding himself with them, he was using them to buy coffees for the guys at work.
The worst of our jobs was one I really wanted to farm out, but we just didn't have the budget for. We needed to replace all of Begonia's sanitation hoses. This is a job that was honestly overdue when we bought the boat, but kept getting pushed back because neither of has us wanted to face it. Now, since we were basically dismantling the empty boat anyway and going to be in the yard for a while, we knew there would be no better time to do it.
Sanitation hose is designed to be pretty impermeable. As such, it's stiff and heavy and difficult to work with. Begonia has over 17 meters (~50 feet) of the stuff snaking its way through hard-to-get-to spaces not unlike her own, uh, digestive tract. We had to deal with two sets of it.
First was removal of the old stuff. Since it had spent decades in its particular orientation, whatever pliability it may once have had was long gone. We quickly learned that the only way we were going to get it out was by cutting it in pieces to do so. Oh, horror! Fortunately, the inside of almost all of it was dry, so we only had to cringe at the scale flaking off and pouring out of the ends as dust.
Of course, once you've breached a hose you're committed to the entire job. There is no way that wrapping six layers of duct tape on the thing and putting it back is ever going to be acceptable. Also, once you've breached a hose, you can't sit anywhere or touch anything without first taking two showers and then changing clothes.
I wouldn't have thought so before starting the job, but the worst part ended up being getting the new hose installed. Unlike the old stuff, you can't cut it to make it easier to pass around a corner or through a bulkhead. The whole thing has to be fed the whole way. It comes from the factory coiled in loops about a meter in diameter and it fights like hell to spring back into the same shape if you try to do anything else with it. In some places, it took all of both of our strength to simultaneously bend and shove and pull the hose into position. Gyms have those giant ropes you're supposed to pump up and down. They need a sanitation hose station where the goal is to feed a long hose through a maze.
As the job wore on, our strength flagged, but the hose was as resistant as ever. We woke up more and more sore every morning. Then came the fun next part. For obvious reasons, the hoses are meant to fit onto the flanges at each end with such a tight fit that the ends first have to be heated and then pushed on with the aforementioned effort. When it finally came time to tighten the hose clamps, neither of us had the strength left to grip a screwdriver.
That was a job that is good to have in the rear view mirror. Hopefully, we don't even have to give any of that system a thought for at least another decade. We probably saved ourselves four thousand dollars in labor costs by doing it ourselves, but now we know for sure that next time, we'll be happy to fork over the dough.
Another big job we had was replacing our steering interconnect tube. This long tube runs between the port and starboard rudders to keep them aligned and is the connection point with all of the rest of the steering system hardware. It runs almost the entire width of Begonia and can only be removed or installed through the side of the boat through the ventilation system. The tube is so long that it couldn't be removed if the boat next to us was too close. We were lucky that the boat on our port side was a smallish monohull that allowed us to just clear their stern by bending the tube as much as we dared. We were worried the replacement tube wouldn't arrive until after they were gone and something bigger would be blocking the access. We got the new one in the day before they left.
That was an interesting boat neighbour. It was regularly visited by a dozen people at a time, who would stay for an hour or two and then all leave en masse. The weird thing was that there was never more than one or two of them who were actually doing anything. The rest stood by, scratching their chins and muttering to each other. Perhaps it was a bunch of Naval Architecture students on a field trip? Any time one of us tried to make conversation, we were either ignored completely or given super-vague answers like, “It's a special boat”. The cat finally escaped from the bag (they never “let” it out) when it was wrapped.
Instead of painting a boat's topsides, like in the olden days, these days a boat has as an option to be wrapped with a heat-shrink plastic covering. The process takes only a day and can completely transform a boat. We came home from the hardware store one afternoon and found that the dingy white boat next to us had turned bright pink. Ah, hah! Neither of us knew the back story, but we both instantly knew what was going on: This boat was being set up as a replica of Jessica Watson's boat, Ella's Pink Lady, on which she had circumnavigated as a teenager. We've read her book. Now it looked like someone was getting ready to make the movie.
Our Film-star neighbour had regular fancy visitors
The Pink Lady getting ready for its movie role
A quick google brought up the story about how Netflix is gearing up for the project. Well, there you go. That also explained so many other things, like why they built a dodger out of plywood and why they put the bottom paint on over the old growth without any prep whatsoever. Late in one of our projects, when I was trying to figure out how to wrestle our main beam back into place, the crowd paid the boat a visit. One of them, bored with watching the one guy do the work, started chatting to me about our project and what we have been up to. Then the conversation shifted to the pink boat. I said it was pretty obvious what was going on now and he broke out of the cone of silence long enough to tell me the boat was going to be used as a set and placed in a tank they were building. The boat would be connected to a hydraulic ram system like the ones used for flight simulators so that it could be thrown around for the action scenes. They didn't need to worry about bottom growth and the dodger didn't need to be able to withstand actual ocean waves.
One curious and obvious change was the name. Jessica Watson's boat clearly said “Ella's Pink Lady” in big, white letters on the side, after her main sponsor. The new boat just said “Pink”. We thought they were just not finished yet, but that's how they launched it later. Perhaps Netflix was not going to give them free advertising or perhaps they didn't want to pay for more. I guess we'll see when the movie comes out.
We had a couple of injuries. Just as we were in the middle of offloading Begonia's contents into the container below, my back went out. Ironically, I felt the big 'pop' as I was in the middle of the physical therapy exercises I do every morning to prevent such a thing. We were able to rearrange the job list to make it easier for me for a few days, but there was nothing we could really do about the long walk to the toilet block. During the worst of it, I was hunched over at a thirty-degree angle and had to stop several times to rest each way.
Maryanne was working beneath the bridge-deck when she hit her head really hard on the dangling anchor. What she didn't notice at the time was that she also bumped her eyebrow. The next morning, when we woke up, I took my first look at her and was shocked to see that she had a black eye. It wasn't minor, either. A wide ring of burgundy surrounded her whole left eye. It got even worse over the next couple of days. We were getting pretty worried about it until a doctor friend of ours explained that it was something called “sympathetic bleeding”. Apparently, if you bust a blood vessel in your eyebrow, that's where the blood goes.
Kyle's back didn't cooperate with the schedule, and Maryanne got a black eye after slamming her head into the anchor
Our time wasn't all work. We quickly learned that the local pub, the Boathouse, has a quiz night every Wednesday night. That was something to look forward to and a nice excuse to knock off an hour or so earlier than usual one day a week. At first, it was just the two of us, but by the time our haul-out was done, we were filling the big table right up front with boaties looking for a break.
About a month in, we finally got to where we had a few areas of Begonia that no longer required full access. That meant we could start transferring the contents of our shipping container back into the boat where it is supposed to live. It gave us a chance to take a good, hard look at each item to review its utility. We managed to lose a few kilos.
Slowly the jobs get completed, and the container is emptied
Outstanding work kept us from emptying the container in one go, but it was nice to see the top of the pile shrink from the ceiling to knee level over the next few weeks. Eventually, enough of the work was done that our main task for the following few days was to empty it completely and get everything back aboard Begonia and stowed in its proper place.
We were doing pretty well until the last day. Begonia was clean and organized inside and there were only a few scattered things left on the container floor. Maryanne had to make an urgent run to the hardware store. By then, it was getting late enough that I decided to just get it all aboard, stuff it where I can and worry about stowing it tomorrow.
The next day, a bunch of stuff came up that needed to be done right away. Stowing would have to wait, but I also had to dig out a bunch of tools and parts, so Begonia became even more of a mess.
My plan to rectify that the next tomorrow was foiled by the weather forecast. Rain was coming, but first, we would have one nice day. That meant that all of the outside work we had planned to do over the next two days had to be completed in one. We finished exhausted and the inside of the boat was such a jumbled mess that we couldn't take a step or sit down without landing on an old part or a pair of pliers.
We were never going to make it. It was Friday, Day 47, and we were finally scheduled to go back in the water on Monday morning. Maryanne had been trying so hard to institute a policy of taking a day each weekend to go into the mountains for something she called “fun”, whatever that is. So far, we had managed a Sunday afternoon at Tamborine Mountain, along with everybody else from Brisbane, two weeks earlier. The next weekend had the only good weather to finish a couple of critical jobs, so that had to be scrubbed. This meant that she really, really, REALLY wanted to go away for our last whole weekend. That meant that by Friday night, all of the outstanding jobs had to be completely done and Begonia had to be clean and shipshape, since there would be no time on Monday morning.
We just made it. Well after dark, we finally got Begonia looking better than she has the whole time we have owned her, but we were both so tired that neither one of us could hardly care. We cracked open a couple of celebratory beers, but struggled to stay awake long enough to finish them.
We ended our weekend get-away returning to Begonia carrying boxes from our favorite local pizza place (so we didn't have to dirty any dishes). Tomorrow, we would finally be going back in the water. Neither one of us could really bring ourselves to believe it and we both slept fitfully with worries about some last-minute thing that was going to crop up and require us to stay out for another two weeks.
In the morning, the travelift arrived, picked Begonia up and then the crew left for lunch (so we could apply antifouling paint to the areas on which she had been resting). We got deja vu from when they lifted us to install the rudders, put us back down and then left us for weeks without taking us along. Then the big tires started rolling and we knew we really were leaving this time.
We still weren't done with all of our jobs. Tarik joined us so that he could get started with a coolant flush on both engines. He asked Maryanne for a jug of water to mix with the solution he had. She pumped about a liter at the sink and then the tank ran dry. We had just made it. I was glad we topped up before hauling out. Once we got to a dock, we filled the tanks again and I spent most of the rest of the day power washing the last remnants of the yard grime away.
Poor Tarik. His boss had told him that the easiest way to drain the cooling system was to let it drain into the bilge and then pump it all out into a container at the end of the job. The rising coolant set off our bilge alarm, which is loud with a high, piercing tone. I heard it from outside, but just thought it was somebody nearby about to start an engine. When the noise didn't go away, I started walking around trying to find the source of the noise. Eventually, I realized it was coming from inside our boat and continued the search there. I finally found Tarik in our berth (which is also the port engine compartment). The noise was echoing around the small space and was SO loud. He couldn't find the actual source of the sound, so he was trying his best to pretend it wasn't acting like a vise on his skull. When I removed the battery, he was relieved, but said the ringing hadn't stopped.
And finally we are returned to the water
Our new slip was only two hundred meters to the west of the pad that we had we occupied for seven weeks. It was sooooo much nicer to be in the water. The intervening work sheds were now facing away from us, which directed the sound from us instead of at us. The Boat Works had also thoughtfully left in a barrier of big trees along the shoreline, which broke up the remaining noise. The main sounds we could hear, when some moron wasn't power washing his deck, was the songs of the various chirpy birds in the trees. It was very peaceful. It was actually an ideal environment for what came next.
Not one, but TWO podcasters had said that they wanted to interview us. The first, Linda Woods of Yachting Yarns, had seen us on the news. When she heard we had been living aboard for nineteen years, she thought we might make for an intriguing episode. She has a background in television and had just started podcasting. She was not a sailor, but thought some of their stories made an interesting theme. She asked about the Tweed Heads thing, but mostly the show was an hour or so long narrative of our Footprint years. I don't think it was planned that way. That's just when we started to run out of time. We did the interview over the phone while seated in Begonia's salon.
Podcasting in the temporary studio aboard Silver Fern
Next up was David Hows with his podcast, Ocean Sailing . That one is apparently the second most downloaded sailing podcast in the world. We met him when he came over to buy some surplus stuff we were trying to keep from transferring from the container back aboard. He also wanted to interview us in person aboard Begonia, but once he found out we probably didn't have enough 230V Australian electricity (The only alternating current we have aboard is via a portable 120V US inverter), he changed the venue to his boat, Silver Fern, which is giant, beautiful, and well-equipped. He had a whole portable studio set up in the salon, complete with a big, fluffy mic each. We talked for well over an hour, focusing mainly on how we got started in the first place and how we managed to take the leap between good jobs and world sailing, with a few stories thrown in. Despite the fact that he speaks to lots of sailors who are top in their niches, he treated us like he thought we had something really interesting to say.
Just as we were getting ready to leave for our final quiz night, Linda called us back. While looking for some pictures to include in the show link, she noticed that we had been through Hurricane Sandy and wanted us to do an impromptu update on what that was like. She said we will probably end up with two episodes.
Once we had slept in a little, we finally left the next morning for somewhere that wasn't The Boat Works. We only went the six miles or so back to Paradise Point, where we anchored before the whole refit started. Maryanne was so good. Despite wanting to get off of the boat and go ashore, she let me do what I wanted, which was a whole lotta nuttin'. We slept in, watched a movie, ate a big meal and then went back to bed early. I got a little bored and was thinking of doing one of the easy remaining jobs, but I decided that violated the principal of a feet-up day (as our friend Nick would say), so I just didn't. It was hard to get out of the habit of always being busy, but it was just what we needed and long overdue at that.
[Maryanne] Seven weeks in a boat yard is a record for us, and one we never hope to need again. Most of the time was not really due the amount of work, but delays with parts, and with tradespeople. We only took three days off during that whole time. The whole experience was exhausting and frustrating, and we are so glad to have the boat (our home) back in the water where she belongs. Now we can look forward to some more cruising time ahead, back to doing what we are here for, and are keen to head north to warmer waters as soon as possible.
So what did we achieve? Most of the work was related to damage repairs, with some routine maintenance and a couple of upgrades. Here is a sample of the works
- Repairs
- Repair/Reinstall binini frame (the bimini is the shade awning for the cockpit)
- Repair bimini canvas
- Clean up Battery compartment - replace solar controllers, redo wiring
- Replace Chartplotter
- Remove/replace beam and fix cracks around beam mounts
- Repair dinghy davits
- Replace steering pole, sheaves, etc damaged in incident
- Replace autopilot unit
- Fix cracks in bulkhead
- Fix leaks in several hatch/deck seals and hatch/glass seals
- Fix leaks in cabin windows
- Repair Rudders and rudder posts
- Remove/fix/replace eye-brow (which gives shade over cabin windows)
- Engine repairs - mounts, etc...
- Repair dingy punctures (poly weld)
- Sail Inspection/Repairs
- Mainsail track repairs
- Fix/Service feathering propellers
- Fix bedroom light wiring - causing intermittent failure.
- Fix Wind generator wiring issue causing over voltage errors
- Inspect/repairs to bows (strange rust spots)
- Remove and re-bed galley sinks
- Remove and re-bed deck hardware that was causing leaks
- Cockpit sliding door track - replace missing guide strips
- Replace Eno Stove burners
- Repaint trim on cockpit window
- Fix various gelcoat dings and cracks on deck
- Fabricate new window covers
- Remove/clean/replace anchor strike plates (that stop the anchor hitting the gelcoat)
- Replace catches on all the portholes aboard (plastic was degrading and seal not holding)
- Replace vent to battery compartment
- Sand/Repaint dinghy mast
- Fix up sewing machine
- Repair/Reinstall shower doors
- Maintenance
- New Batteries - no problems with the old ones, but it's coming due
- Rigging inspection / adjustments
- All new sanitation hose
- Reverse anchor chain (to help extend life)
- Prep and apply anti-foul bottom paint
- Polish and wax hulls
- Engine and saildrive maintenance
- Fridge compressor check / wiring rerun
- Paint internal walls (hulls and berths)
- Service Windlass (helps pull up anchor chain)
- Service all winches
- Inspect/service through-hulls
- Inspect/service Webasto heater
- Clean water tank sight tubes
- Make new dinghy slings (Webbing)
- Repaint forward bow compartments (Bilge paint)
- Sand/Varnish hallway skirting boards
- Replace shower/bilge pumps (working, but about time)
- Change out water tank valves for easier ones.
- Replace speedwheel so we have a working water temperature sensor
- Upgrades
- New Double helm seat (including supports and cover)
- Change cabin lights for touch-sensitive on-dim-off versions
- Installed wheels on our dinghy to (hopefully) make taking it ashore a little easier
- Installed a gas strut on top loading fridge door
- Replace handles on butcher block/sink cover
A lot of the effort was removing and replacing things to gain access for other work, and we also had to replace all the items that were washed overboard, or were ruined from the seawater that found itself inside (we had a LOT of parcel deliveries to the Boat Works). Additionally we managed a trip to the dentist and skin cancer checks (all clear), and submitted another visa extension application so we can (hopefully) stay in Australia a little longer.
