Making the Most of a Minimal Budget. Contact me at: skintsailor@yahoo.co.uk or on Twitter: @skintsailor

Sunday 8 May 2016

New Jobs, Old Jobs

I had 5 hours on the boat in the Sunshine today, the longest I've been on board in months.

I got the jib properly installed and also re-rigged the main. The jib looks good:



The first bit of bad news is as soon as I started tightening the foot of the main some more of the original stitching burst, so I'll have to re-stitch it. With any luck I can do it in situ with the speedy stitcher as it's only a small length of stitching.

A new job that has cropped up is the bow roller plate. I noticed while checking the forestay over that it's coming adrift from the bow, it's lifted up by about 5mm. The plate appears bent upwards, which I've no idea how it could happen. Unless the bow encountered one of the loose boats during the winter storms. But it's a new lob to add to the list.

Anyway, after sorting the sails I did a few jobs. Ran the outboard, took the spray hood off and brought the hood material back home for re-stitching.

Raising the voltage the solar charge controller stops charging the battery a while ago seems to have worked. I raised the voltage to 14.1 instead of 13.8 and it seems to have charged the batteries to a deeper level. They held 13.8 all day aided by the solar panel, where normally they would drop to 12.4 as soon as I drew current from them before.

Last week I ground the plates for the locker top hinges down and on the boat today they look like they'll fit fine now. So the next job on the locker tops is to paint them prior to taking them on board and installing them.

So some jobs done, some more new ones appear. It's like the Forth bridge!

2 comments:

  1. Looks like you are making some good progress. I haven't spent 5 minutes working on Serenity this year, other than taking the winter cover off. Too many other projects, I was told, had higher priority.

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  2. As always it's slow progress, but at some point this year I want to get antifoul on the hull as it's not had any on it for a number of years.
    That should be it. For a while anyway.

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