Life on the hard

Now we have been up on land for a couple of days and we continue to work hard with getting everything ready. Our first mission was to remove all anti-fouling. After a couple of days scraping and sanding it was finally gone and we could continue with other things.

Most of the old epoxy primer is in pretty good shape, but there are some places were the old paint has gone loose. We sanded up those places to get an even surface for the new epoxy primer we will paint later.

Now we will let the hull dry for a couple of more days before we seal it up and start painting. But we are not out of work in the meantime. We have some repairs we want to do above the waterline. We have a sandwich hull and a lot of the attachments on deck have small cracks where water can sip through into the hull. As mentioned, thankfully, we have a core material that is not made out of wood.

So while we let the hull dry we continue to work on sealing all attachments on deck. So we removed a bunch of stuff; the sheet rail, mooring bollard, the one fairlead that was left. Started to sand around them and repair with epoxy.

For the fairleads it has been pretty hard finding an equal one as the old ones. So we bought new one that will sit on top instead of integrated with the hull. So we removed the old one and filled the old holes up.

We also removed the sheet rails on both sides, we drilled up the old holes and filled them with epoxy.

Next up was the chainplates. Our plan with the chainplates is to repair what is needed with epoxy around them, but leave a small opening around the plates. This opening we will fill up with butyl-tape which will be kept in place with a small custom made metal. This was it will hopefully not be any leakages and the movements and tensions from the chain won’t break the plastic around them. But more on this and better pictures in the future when we’ve actually done this.

Our “On the hard to-do list” and some status updates:

• Remove old anti-fouling – Done!
• Repair all possible leakages above deck (chainplates, fairleads etc etc) – work ongoing
• Go over and change through-hulls were it is needed – some through-hulls removed and new ones ordered. 
• Go over bow-thruster – Work ongoing, taken apart and new sealings ordered
• Go over propeller – Prop removed and ready for some love
• Paint with epoxy primer, both below waterline and above at some places
• New anti-fouling
• Prepare topsides before painting
• Paint the topsides