Last year’s bottom paint was still looking as unblemished as ever, but it would not likely make it another year and a half until we have time to redo it again, so we decided to top up with a few coats now to tide us over until then.
There were a few things that needed to be addressed since our last stem-to-stern refit last year. Since The Boat Works is probably the southern hemisphere’s best boatyard, dealing with all of the trades-folk could be done quickly and on-site while we waited for the paint to dry between coats. We could also use the yard’s courtesy cars for a big provision and drive the load right up to the boat, which is even easier than being in a marina and way easier than anchoring out.
Like these things always go, as soon as we started dismantling things, we found even more that we originally decided to deal with. The worst of these, time-wise, was a disintegrating shim on one of our props. It’s a fairly minor part, but it has to be ordered from Germany and installed by a qualified technician who, of course, had a backlog, but was nice enough to squeeze us in once the part arrived.
That pretty much dictated our timetable, since it delayed our splash date by another week. We had to do stuff every day, but not all day. We only used every photon of sunlight a day offered one time. The rest of the work, we were able to do on an eight to four or five o’clock schedule.
Hard at work for a few weeks in the yard again
Just as we were winding down and looking forward to three easy half-days before going in the water, I went up the mast to have a good close look at the rigging to see how it had fared during that horrible sail up the coast from the Southport entrance. There, I found two broken strands on our starboard shroud, just outside the terminal swage. Damn! This is bad. I could make up a replacement with our spare, but then we would have no spare. {All our rigging was new in Dec 2021, professionally inspected in July 2022, and regularly checked over by Kyle, so this was quite a surprise – and exactly why we regularly inspect it ourselves.}.
On the off chance that they weren’t totally backlogged, I went to the rigger at Everything Marine and asked if there was any chance they could help. The guy said he was busy until the end of next month, but if I could take the shroud off and bring it in, he would try to make a replacement in between other jobs. Great! And, I guess my other jobs for the day will have to wait.
When I got the old shroud off and took it in, we were keen to get an understanding of why the fault had occurred on such new rigging (that had been professionally inspected after our Tweed Heads incident). It was all double-checked and measured and determined that the wire had been over-swaged. For those that aren’t really into rigging, a swage is basically a tube of stainless steel into which the wire is inserted. That tube is then squished down onto the wire until it is held with considerable pressure, creating friction with the wire. If the swage is not squeezed hard enough, the wire can slip out. If it is squeezed too tight, the wire strands can be fractured, weakening them. The manufacturer of the swaging machine that does this squishing publishes a table of acceptable post-squish dimensions. Ours was below the lower limit, thus over-swaged.
Well, it was good to know the wire, which was installed new fifteen months earlier in Exmouth, was not faulty. The bad thing, of course was that all of the other wires were installed at the same time using the same swaging machine. Back up the mast I went (which is now held up by only two wires and a couple of rope halyards). With calipers in hand, I carefully measured all of the remaining swages and radioed the numbers down to Maryanne. She diligently recorded them and compared them with the relevant tables. After triple and quadruple-checking everything, we determined that all of the other wires on the mast, including the three that don’t hold it up, but keep it in column, plus the martingale on the forward beam, were within tolerance. Only the starboard shroud was a problem.
This was good news because there were a few tense hours there where we thought we may have to replace all of the standing rigging again, which really would delay us for months (let alone another huge unexpected expense). We emailed our last rigger in Perth. We got the expected responses: We don’t know how to properly use calipers. Our calipers are cheap crap. The rigger at Everything Marine is probably using worn-out calipers that are also cheap and that he also doesn’t know how to use. Only his calipers are the gold standard of all calipers. We can’t possibly know what we’re doing. Okay, but three different sets of calipers used by four different people came up with the same result, and two strands in that swage lasted only 7% of their normal service life. Well, at least we now know one new thing to check the next time, which will hopefully be the next decade.
Well, a huge thanks to Everything Marine. The rigger didn’t have a blank swage with our pin size, so he picked one up on his way home from work. He had the completed shroud ready to be picked up seventeen hours after I first darkened his door with a problem, which is only about an hour longer than the shop was closed for the night. We were impressed and grateful.
Since we were generally only slightly completely exhausted at the end of each day of boat jobs, Maryanne made a point of reserving the courtesy car quite frequently (especially over night), with the aim of making sure we were well and truly struggling to keep our eyes open by the time we crawled into our berth.
Unexpected treats: a gift basket from Kate, and sunset in the yard.
Mostly, we snuck off for a bit of fun. Matthew, a young American man, visiting/working on a Backpacker visa, befriended us after happening upon Begonia while she was moored at Constitution Dock in Hobart in February 2020. When we arrived in Queensland this year, he sent us a message saying that he was now living on the Gold Coast. Could we meet up? Well, certainly! We invited him to the Wednesday Trivia Night at The Boat House pub and he responded by inviting us to Trivia Night at the RSL in Surfer’s Paradise.
Matt is a good guy to have on your team. He’s intelligent and well educated, and as such has a brain full of all sorts of obscure information (and especially good with movie and pop-music dates). Along with Dick from Maia, who was also at The Boat Works, we won First Prize the first week. Usually that honor goes to big teams with many brains, but we managed to beat out both of the perennial teams who are always swapping first and second. We managed to do it one more time and usually did well enough for the prizes to at least partly cover our costs for the evening.
Matthew even swung by the boat one day, asking to be put to work. We tried not to abuse him too much, but his extra pair of hands was most useful when it came time to dismantle our wind turbine. The yaw bearing had seized during the deluge we encountered while sailing up the outside of Moreton Island. Thus, it no longer pointed into the wind and it had to be taken apart so the bearing could be replaced.
Our wedding anniversary also occurred during the haulout (Anniversary #19!), so we took a weekend away to rent a house on a hill with a view, which we used as a base for many rejuvenating walks in the woods. Additionally we FINALLY got some quality time with Jan and Richard of Morpheus of London, some dining at Hope Island Marina and even a trip to a return to the Mt Nathan winery.
A weekend away to Lamington National Park (and surrounds) was a perfect escape
With lots of tea shops and scenic walks (and the Mt Nathan winery for a generous tasting).
Wine tasting with Morpheus, and visiting Surfers' Paradise to meet with Matt (and friends) for a weekly "Trivia night" all helped sweeten our time in the yard
Once the new shroud was installed, I was finally able to turn my attention to replacing our trampoline. After 6½ years and 52,000 miles, it had finally come time to replace it. Lashing the new one on is not particularly difficult, but it is time consuming. I managed to get it finished right at dusk on the last night before we went back in the water. Then I had one last go over the freshly tidied interior with our shop-vac and we were finally ready to be set free.
We then had an afternoon at a dock, which we used to fill our water tanks, do one last load of laundry and pressure wash the decks clean of the ubiquitous black boatyard dust. We got one last takeout pizza from the excellent place opposite The Boat House pub and we were finally ready to resume cruising.
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