Bit of a bonus weekend as both Jane and Carl have Saturday and Sunday off so after picking them up from the big shed that keeps Morereasons supplied with stuff at 5:30am it was hit the road to Fambridge on a dull and damp morning.
After a diversion to B&Q in Chelmsford to stock up on Meths for the stove, I arrived around 8:30 and caught a lift on the ferry down to the boat. Two things were immediately noticeable - one was the significant amount of weed growth around the waterline, the other was that she was distinctly down by the stern by a couple of inches. Hmmm!
Firing up the increasingly reliable Suzi - which hasn't played up at all the last couple of trips, maybe it was slow to wake up from it's winter hibernation, I motored the hundred yards or so up onto the pontoon where a kindly passer by caught my bow line for me.
First order of business was Cunning Plan #B for retrieving the topping lift. This involved hoisting a boathook on the main halyard with a control line tied to the bottom of it and trying to fish for the eyesplice. No matter how many times I tried, every time it got anywhere near the top of the mast it invariably twisted away and I couldn't control it with anywhere near sufficient accuracy to catch the offending string. To be honest, I'd half expected this would be the case but it had to be tried.
Ferryman Ian then offered the services of his daughter who'd be down on their yacht later in the day. I was a bit dubious about hoisting somebody else's child up my mast but reluctant to seem churlish and he was positive she'd consider it "fun" so that was agreed upon.
Other tasks were waiting to be tackled - first up was to reconnect the bilge pump and pump out the well under the cockpit which was half full of water. In the process, I discovered that there is a limber hole draining the port cockpit locker into the well but no sign of a matching drain on the starboard locker. As both lockers are accumulating water this needs to be sorted. We also need to replace the faulty float switch on the bilge pump - it's not a safety issue as the worst cases scenario is that the well will fill to cockpit floor level at which point it can go no further due to the cockpit drains. With the water evacuated she floated to her marks again.
My next mission was to fit the new cabin mushroom vents. One wouldn't open, the other wouldn't close and both of them leaked so two new ones had been laid in ready. The old ones came off easy enough and I fitted the new ones on a bed of sealant after drilling new pilot holes for the screws in between the existing holes - it's never a good idea to screw back into the existing holes if you want something to bed down properly!
Item no.3 was navigation lights. Although I have no intention of night boating at this stage of the learning curve, there's always the possibility of either getting caught out on timings or being forced by circumstances to be on the move in the dark. All three lights were suffering from bad connections due to bloody awful wiring than even an amateur would be ashamed of. Crimping spade connectors onto the wires instead of just wrapping them around the terminal sorted out the port light, replacing the incorrect sized spade connectors with the correct ones and replacing two badly crimped bullet connectors sorted out the starboard light. The stern light needed nothing more than the wires cutting back and fitting into the screw terminals properly. Hey presto, three working nav lights Just one job I forgot though - the steaming light was working but I swapped the connections over to try out the masthead anchor light, which didn't work, and I need to swap them back again. That's a five minute job next weekend.
Ian and his daughters arrived and with no fuss Charlotte was in the bosuns chair and Ian started to haul her up the mast on the main halyard - I was more than somewhat relieved that Ian took charge as I was not at all keen on being responsible for the safety of somebody's child up a mast. All went well until Charlotte was just above the spreaders at which point, no matter what we tried, the masthead block kept swiveling away from the line of pull and jamming. I would have called a halt to proceedings anyway but Ian beat me to it - he wisely felt, as I had done when trying to hoist Mark up the mast, that forcing the issue could break something and be seriously dangerous. Oh well, that was Plan #C down the drain. It seemed the fates were determined on us having to drop the mast mid-season.
By now, what with frequent halts to brew up and chatting to people on the dock and what have you it was late afternoon and I was tiring having not slept all that well the previous night (often the case on Friday night as it's a bugger making the transition from four nights at work to being awake during the day at weekends). I settled down below decks to read a book in peace - a rare commodity at home. Chille-con-carne, also a rare treat as Jane hates the stuff, and rice took care of dinner followed by more reading until by 20:30 my eyes were closing of their own accord and without even broaching the beer or rum stocks I crawled into my sleeping bag and nodded off.
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