The Mast Came Down

Tuesday was a big day for us.  With minimal hassle the mast came down and then immediately afterwards BV was craned out of the water and blocked up on the hard.

Technically it all went very smoothly, which is great, but having several hundred (?) Kgs of mast and ancillaries hanging off a crane and being swung about in the wind directly above your pride and joy does tend to put you on edge somewhat.  Swinging the mast  horizontal, to load onto some mast trolleys, was equally 'entertaining'!

Whilst BV was hanging in the slings we were able to take turns with the jet-wash to clean off a year's worth of grot.  With work commitments we had not kept BV moving as much as we would have liked which is never good for helping to prevent a 'beard' growing on her underside.  It also highlighted that that the bronze fitting on the base of the skeg needed to be treated with Coppercoat as there was extra growth there; one of our planned jobs for this haul-out.  Strangely this was not painted when we had had the hull Coppercoated a few years ago.  Whilst Coppercoat may not stick brilliantly to bronze that doesn't seem like a good reason not to paint it.  I guess professionals are worried about complaints if the antifouling peels off earlier than expected.

After all of the careful work taking down the mast, hauling BV out and cleaning off her underside there wasn't much of the day left.  Nicky had to be back at work on Wednesday so we covered one final job that definitely needed two people to complete it.  That was changing the bolts that hold on the sacrificial anodes.  Not a difficult task but it definitely needed one person on the outside of the hull with a spanner whilst another was on the inside tightening things up.

All in all we ended the day with a great sense of relief that the potential complexity of getting the mast down and BV out of the water was behind us.  There was however now a BIG list of jobs that needed to be tackled before the planned lift-in on Wednesday of next week.