Deltaville Refit (Part 2) VA USA

Fresh back from our weekend away in Charlottesville and Richmond (including an awesome night’s sleep in hugely comfortable, proper bed at Bill and Lydia’s flat), we set to immediately with the maintenance chores again.  Nicky continued to build up the layers of new varnish on everything wooden whilst I started my favourite game again, sanding.  The Coppercoat had dried and looked fabulous but the copper particles are encased in epoxy so to ‘activate it’ you need to sand the Coppercoat to remove the very top layer of epoxy and expose the copper to the seawater so that it can do its antifouling job.  We also needed to paint the areas that were covered by the pads that were propping us up.  All in all, finishing the Coppercoat antifouling kept me busy for several more days.

Left and centre: boom off the gooseneck.  Right: rivets drilled out, gooseneck removed and Duralac painted on (to prevent electrolysis between the aluminium mast and the steel gooseneck fitting

I could then turn my hand to the other important jobs.  The top priority on the list was sorting out the gooseneck and associated mast fittings.  We were aware that the boom could move about on its mounting pin and so I wanted to fit some plastic washers that I had sourced to take up any slack.  We also wanted to do the same on the kicking strap fittings.  But, as well as the boom and kicking strap ‘clunking’ slightly with the play in the systems, I had also noticed that the whole of the gooseneck mounting plate on the mast seemed to be moving slightly with each clunk.  This was a lot more worrying and I had wanted to sort this out last year.  But not only had we not stopped anywhere long enough to tackle the job, I had needed to obtain the right sized rivets and a very large rivet gun.  We’d ordered the rivets from Selden when we had been back home and Steve on Innamorata II kindly lent us his electric drill and rivet gun; both very far more capable than the tools we had on board BV.

Detaching the boom and other fittings revealed that whilst the existing rivets were solid, the plate was free to move slightly.  So, I partially drilled out the rivets (all 18 of them!) and chiselled off the tops to allow the plate to be removed.  Then I chiselled off the protruding remains of the rivets so that they were flush with the mast and punched into the mast to fall out of a hole in the foot.  Then it was merely a matter of cleaning up the holes, coating the area with Duralac and reattaching the plate with new rivets and a good bed of hard epoxy filler to fill up any wear or gaps between the plate and the new rivets.  I have to say that I was significantly concerned about the prospect of drilling out the rivets but with the help of tools and advice from fellow yachties in the yard I was able to complete that part of the job in a morning.

I spent the rest of the day making aluminium bushes of various thicknesses to take out the play in the gooseneck and kicking strap fittings.  Each needed to be hand cut and ground to size and with those and the new plastic washers in place the boom and kicking strap are now totally secure with no noticeable play or movement.  We’ll have to see how they perform when we sail but hopefully that will be the end of the ‘clunking’ for the next few years.

The dinghy got some ‘love’ with a good clean, fresh paint on the transom and the loose seams stuck down again

Whilst I was working on the mast, Nicky spent her time zipping backwards and forwards from the storage unit. Large pieces of wood came back beautifully varnished, exchanged for sanded and prepared replacements ready for treatment in her ‘varnishing shop’.  The staged return of the floorboards was a delight and each day we could move around down below more easily.  The dinghy also had a trip out to the ‘varnishing shop’.  It got a good clean, had some loose trim and seams stuck back on and the transom sanded back and repainted.

Our Gori propeller stripped apart ready for new anodes and the all-important new plastic shim

Then, 6 days before we relaunched we had a very lucky break.  Edwin, on the Dutch yacht Ebijmar next to us, had returned from Holland and during our conversations he took a look at our Gori propeller and gave the blades a wiggle.  He told us that there was far too much play but that he knew how to fix the problem because he had had the same issue with his propeller and had sought Gori’s engineering advice.  There is no real mention of it in the instruction manual but deep inside the hub [Ed: in the bit that instructions say don’t take apart!!!] there is a plastic shim that wears.  Too much wear and the blades wiggle so it needs replacing.  Now that we knew this, I was able to order the correct kit which came with several shims of varying thickness.  We would replace our worn shim the thickest one that would fit to tighten everything up again and take out the play.

The shims kit arrived the next day along with the invoice.  Fast shipping was, as expected, expensive but the shims turned out to be the most expensive bits of plastic I have ever bought; the kits were 5 times the price that they would be in the UK!  However, putting it all into perspective, we had been able to fix the propeller ourselves without needing to pay an expensive engineer.  Plus, if it hadn’t been for Edwin’s timely advice, we would have relaunched and then found that there was a problem with the propeller and so would have had to have arranged for BV to be lifted out again.  Overall we felt that we had been very lucky with the timing and the fabulous support from our fellow yachties in the yard.

Top left: The old compressor.  Next right: The new compressor in place.  Right: Fitting the new larger evaporator plate

It felt like time was running out for us as we considered the last jobs that needed attending to before our booked relaunch on Tuesday 1 October.  Initially I wanted to fit some new cockpit drains.  We had the new units but after digging about in the darker recesses of the lazarettes it became clear that getting the old cockpit drains out was a major task.  Also, the pipes were different size to the fittings on the units and so we would need to find some adaptors.  Fitting the new units was largely a cosmetic job so, on balance, we put that off until we had found the necessary parts and turned our attentions to a much more exciting task; fitting the new refrigerator.

Now fitting a new refrigerator, cooker and reupholstering might seem a bit extravagant but with our 20 year old items definitely showing signs of being on their last legs, we had decided that we could renew then far more economically now in the USA, at a time of our choosing, than when they fail in an out of the way location.  [Ed: cost for replacements out on the islands normally run at around double what we’ve paid here plus, of course, the time delays, inconvenience, customs import charges etc].  So, its been a bit of a case of spend to save.  In the case of the refrigerator, we also took the opportunity to fit a larger unit (the previous one was undersized for the volume of the coolbox) so that it cools down the whole box to the proper fridge temperature.

One of our 6  Blakes seacocks stripped down for cleaning and relubricating

No lift-out would be complete without a strip down and lubricate of the Blakes seacocks.  I have to say that I am slightly superstitious about these seacocks.  Ours have always been fine and there were no indications of their seizing up but I still have that feeling that the one time we lift out and I don’t work on them, they will immediately seize up and need us to lift out again.  Whether or not these illogical concerns are justified, our seacocks got their normal strip down and attention ready for the lift-in.

With all of the woodwork varnished and back on the boat, the very last job on our list was to wind in the anchor chain.  We’d taken it all out to remove the weight from BV over the summer so before replacing it we decided to end-for-end the chain and paint markings on it rather than using our previous system of plastic tie wraps.  The plastic markers were okay but kept breaking off; hopefully the new painted markers will last better.

It has been a lot of hard manual labour but we now have a rejuvenated boat that looks fabulous and also, a lot of aching muscles (remember that fitness routine we needed after our trip home?).  However, we are ready for the 0800hrs lift in booked for the morning and we feel that we have really achieved something over the last few weeks.

Deltaville, Virginia, USA