A Long Easter Weekend

Sadly no sailing because Nicky was on call for work and so had to be able to get back quickly.  We were however able to get down to BV and work away at our list of outstanding jobs.  We therefore set about a couple of big tasks that we knew would take several days.  As always, even being pessimistic, everything seemed to take twice as long!

The aspiration was to remove the headlining panels in the saloon and forepeak, prepare the forepeak for a final coat of varnish, add some insulation to the deck-head, fit some fans, and also to lay some coaxial from the chart table to the foot of the mast.

The headlining panels are all held on with velcro and bizarrely we found the best tool to work in and separate the velcro strips was a fish-slice.  I guess that fulfils the adage that everything onboard should have at least two uses!  With the headlining panels down BV started to look a bit of a mess and that only got worse as we started to lay some new cables.  We replaced the coax for the VHF radio between the radio and the foot of the mast.  We will replace the rest of the coax in the mast when we take the mast down later this year.  We also laid a new length of coax which we will use for an AIS transponder aerial also to be fitted to the mast when it is down.  We have discovered that our Icom VHF radio will broadcast fog signals if we fit a loudspeaker.  We therefore ran a cable for that ready for fitting the loudspeaker to the mast below the radome.  To say 'we ran a cable' makes it sound very easy.  In general it was but there was the odd S-bend in the cable runs that left us feeling like experts in keyhole surgery.

With the middle headlining panels down to run the cables we went the whole hog and removed all of them so that we could run the cables and fit some fans.  We fitted one fan in each of the cabins, one by the galley and one over the chart table.  Hopefully these will help with airflow to keep things much more comfortable in hot climates.

The really big job we embarked on, however, was to add in some insulation between the headlining panels and the deck-head.  For this we had found some plastic insulation which looks like thin bubble-wrap with a layer of reflective space-blanket on each side.  It took a day and a half to cut out and fit the insulation in the saloon and at the end of that our arms, necks and backs ached like mad.  I guess it's not often you spend that long with your arms up above your head.  The insulation was thin enough to feed in against the deckhead with all of the cable-runs below but it took a bit of care to mark out and cut holes for all of the wooden pads that are the attachment points for the headlining panels and teak strips.

Now it is all complete the insulation looks very good.  After all of the hard work it almost seems a shame to cover it all up with the headlining.  It was fiddly work but we hope that the insulation will help keep the saloon cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  With everthing down Nicky also managed to touch up the varnish on a couple of the teak roof strips.  A couple more coats on those and hopefully we won't have to remove the headlining panels for quite a while.

All in all a pretty successful long weekend with some more work ticked off the list.  We never managed to prepare the forepeak for its final coat of varnish though.  Probably just as well as it rained and that doesn't create the best atmosphere for varnish to dry.  Maybe a job for next weekend?  Having been impressed with the insulation we have fitted we now intend to fit the same to the deckhead above the aft and forepeak cabins.  So with a few jobs ticked off the list we find that we have now added a couple more.  Notwithstanding that, with some larger task now completed it is starting to feel as though we are making headway in out preparations which is fantastic.