Sanding - lots of it.

Limbo has hardwood bulwarks (no sniggering) atop a 6-inch wide hardwood strip, with a protruding 1-inch wide rubbing strake at the lower edge. This should be an attractive feature, and used to look briefly acceptable when freshly oiled, but was now horribly patchy and grey.

'Before' is on the left.  See what I mean?

What was worse, the port strake was coming away from the hull in places.

New forehatch

The old hatch was fairly knackered, to use a technical term.  The aluminium was corroded, one of the safety bars was loose, and it leaked. 

The old hatch

Part of this was due to a fundamentally flawed design that seemed made to hold a pool of water against the seal, so rather than use an identical replacement (Houdini hatches are still available) I sourced a new design from Gebo, handily made to fit in exactly the same cut-out.

Rudder improvements

It’s been a while since writing.  We had a good three weeks’ cruise to Brittany last summer, although the weather left much to be desired. I'll write that up later. Since then, I’ve been focusing on some upgrades.  I'll write these up, for a mark of progress as much as anything! 

New Rudder Fittings

One thing I’d been meaning to check for a while was the state of the rudder fittings.  Limbo’s rudder is a simple affair, attached to the transom and the base of the keel by three brackets.  

The bottom, and main, of these turned out to be badly corroded.  Not only were the nuts hanging on to almost non-existent threads, the area around the pin was deeply pitted. The middle fitting was weeping rust on the interior of the hull.  It didn’t take much in-depth metallurgical knowledge to work out that replacement was in order.  The photos below tell the story…

The Cost of Complexity

It was beautiful weather this weekend, but Limbo is yet to have an outing.  I'm making progress though; the new water pipes, filter and pump are in (tastes pretty good so far), the engine has a new impeller and started first time, and the decks are scrubbed.  I've given the cockpit's teak grating a good clean (oxalic acid brought the colour back), glued a broken piece of the cap rail (Gorilla glue - seems to work..) and even got round to scraping off the remnants of a Poole harbour dues sticker I unwisely attached to one of the windows a couple of years ago (white spirit).

Tankage

Limbo is back in the water, looking a bit grubby after a long, cold winter on the hard.

I went down to check on her at the weekend, planning to give her a good clean, but I got sidetracked by investigating the water tank under the cabin floor.  The water was smelly and undrinkable last season and I've been meaning to sort it out for a while.

The floor was quite easy to remove, with just a couple of screws, but getting the tank out through a small gap in the beams was tricky - it's not that flexible any more.  I scraped a chunk of skin off my hand in the process.  Blood and swearing.  Last time I was on the boat I managed to crush part of a fingernail; so that's two scars from the season even before getting out on the water..  Eventually I was rewarded with a lovely beige, bilge-oil-smeared sausage of aged water tank sitting on the pontoon.  Funny how that was so satisfying.

After many sloshings around with hot water from the bath tap at home, the addition of some baking powder and an overnight application of Puriclean, the water looks almost drinkable.  The stuff that came out at first was frankly disturbing.  I'm going to change the pipes, fit a decent foot pump and add an in-line charcoal filter (£20 or so), which will hopefully result in the untold luxury of drinking water straight from the tap this year.

There's no shortage of little and not-so-little improvements to fit in soon, but the priority is to get Limbo out sailing again before too long.  She still needs that bath though.