Winter Work (Part 1)

I’m slowly working my way through the Sep and Oct 2015 blog entries to add in the missing pictures and so you will be able to look back and see the blog entries as they were intended to be. Despite now having a computer which works, our home renovation distractions are making finishing the 2015 blog very slow work. That said, I aim to finish them all before we travel back out to BV shortly for the 2016 sailing season. In the interim I’m adding a couple of entries to bring you up to date on what’s been happened over the winter months.

Winter always involves maintenance work on yachts. For us being so far away from our yacht that means fitting the work we are doing into our time at the end of the sailing season and, more importantly, right at the beginning of the sailing season. When we get back to Blue Velvet we’ll need to attend to all of those tasks and checking out what has stopped working whilst she has laid dormant over the winter months. That time is fast approaching. However, for larger jobs which are beyond our skillset, the winter provides a good window of opportunity to get them attended to by proffessionals.

The unslightly mark on BV’s port topside    

The main task in this category for us was sorting out a rather unsightly mark on the port side of BV. The previous owners had badly scratched the gelcoat mooring up during a gale just before we bought BV from them. At the time the professional repair was good with an almost perfect colour match, however, over the last 8 years the repaired gelcoat has started to stand out. In particular the last few years of Mediterranean sunlight has turned the repaired gelcoat a lighter colour. Polishing does help but we decided that this winter we’d take a more drastic approach.

Once we had left BV in Turkey and returned home the carpenter, who had worked on BV’s cockpit last winter, was given the go-ahead to build a frame around the hull. This would allow BV to be totally enclosed during the repainting process to help ensure the best possible finish.

Our swimming ladder, Hydrovane, plus any skin fittings which could realistically be removed, were...

... and then the topsides were rubbed down. They applied a layer of fine filler over the whole area and rubbed it all down before they could move onto the painting.

The whole painting process was far more complex than I had expected. Initially ‘barrier’ layers were sprayed on. I thought that this was the primer but it is apparently more of a sealing and filling layer.

Next to be applied were layers of white Awgrip Primer before some enhancements were made to BV’s spray bay tent.

All of the painting work on BV was planned to be completed before the end of the first week of December. This was to ensure that it was all done before the rainy winter period set in. Unfortunately there was an early period of rain in November which held things up. Quite rightly we agreed that it was not worth compromising the paint finish by rushing the job in humid conditions.

To ensure the best drying conditions for the multiple blue layers of paint, an extractor fan and heating system was installed in the spray tent. We also had a discussion about the colour of the paint. We’d picked the colour from the colour charts before we had left Turkey but, having now worked on BV, the chief painter was concerned that we had picked the wrong shade of blue. He was worried that for our size of yacht the shade we had picked was just too blue. This prompted a frenzied analysis of the Awlgrip colour charts. On the chart the colour difference was very subtle but actually we agreed with the painting team chief and the order for the new shade of paint was confirmed.

Marmaris, Turkey