Not cooking on gas

We decided early on to remove the gas installation from Marelle. Tony Head, our surveyor, had warned against using the hot water heater until we had got it checked over properly, and Martin and I are both wary of using gas on boats - especially classic boats with deep bilges - due to the risk of a leak causing an explosion. Marelle did have a reasonable installation with a couple of gas alarm sensors, and flame failure cut offs on the burners on the Plastimo cooker as she had been coded for sail training. Even so, for peace of mind and to free up space on the aft deck, we went ahead and removed the gas bottle locker in April.

Taylors 030 cooker

Looking at alternative cookers highlighted that Marelle seems to have the smallest cooker available installed - and with only just enough room for that! She originally had a Taylors 029 cooker, looking at her build plans, which is the 2 burner model with a warming oven. We both love the look of the Taylors cookers, but since they were bought by Blakes Lavac the prices are sky high for either new cookers or for parts. We were outbid on a second hand Taylors 030 on eBay, and in the end picked up an all brass Taylors 029 at Beaulieu boat jumble. In theory we should be able to run both the cooker and the Taylors heater already on Marelle from one paraffin tank. We have read about other installations that use two tanks, with a valve in between, so that one tank can be in the cockpit for easier filling, and the other inside the boat. This sounds like a good way of doing things.

While we were looking for Taylors cookers, I came across a German website hytta.de selling ex army Swedish Optimus cookers and spares at very reasonable prices. Optimus are the makers of the burners that Taylors use, and the Optimus 155 two burner self contained cooker seemed like a bargain at £185.10 including postage. The other advantage of this is that being self contained we could test the burners for the heater at home before refitting them on the boat, and in fact see if we could get used to lighting pressurised paraffin before committing a lot of money to a Taylors.

Optimus 155W cooker

The Optimus, being army kit I suppose, is not as good looking as the Taylors but is robust and straightforward to use.

We tried out the Optimus in the carport at home. There are two methods of pre-heating the burners - either by burning a small quantity of meths below the burner, or playing a blow torch over the burner legs for a minute or so. Some people say the blowtorch is better in a sea as there is a possibility that the meths could spill.

The meths worked fine, we let it burn for a couple of minutes till it had nearly used up the meths and then switched to the paraffin, which lit with a nice blue flame. Encouraged by this, we tried the blowtorch on the other burner. Instead of a nice controlled blue flame, we got yellow flames, and lots of them, as basically we hadn't used the blowtorch for long enough and the burner wasn't hot enough to vapourise the paraffin. The paraffin was coming out in liquid form, and burning with yellow flames shooting up a couple of feet above the cooker - not good! Switching it off at the control for the burner made no difference. We carefully released the pressure valve on the tank and waited at a safe distance for the flames to go out.

Origo 3000 cooker

Although we knew what had happened, this experience made us a bit cautious of having a paraffin cooker on board - we knew we could probably get used to it but we weren't sure if guests would be happy with it. On Sarila, we had used an Origo unpressurised alcohol cooker and been very pleased with it, so we decided to get one of these. Some people don't like alcohol cookers as if you burn meths in them it doesn't smell very nice, and it is hard to get industrial denatured alcohol in this country. However we have found a supplier of it in Lymington. Burning industrial denatured alcohol only smells a little, and the smell is like the alcohol hand cleaner you find in hospitals, so not unpleasant at all. Since it is unpressurised it is very safe and easy to use - to refill, the wadding containers are removed completely from the cooker and the alcohol poured in to them, then replaced in the cooker. The only minor issue we have had is that the alcohol can evaporate from the wadding when the cooker is not in use, if you forget to put the covers on the burners. Alcohol burns slightly cooler than gas, but we have not found this to be a problem - it takes I suppose, a couple more minutes to boil a kettle but on the boat we don't tend to be in a hurry.

Curiously, the cheapest source we found for the Origo cooker was again in Germany - www.hammerkauf.de - even including the postage they were between £40 and £70 cheaper than chandleries in the UK. Hammerkauf were very efficient and the cooker arrived in less than a week, in perfect condition.

We now have three cookers that won't fit on Marelle without some modifications to the galley, and one cooker (the original gas one) on board Marelle, that is disconnected...

Update June 2012:

Make that four cookers... finally got a second hand Taylors 030L on ebay, which is the biggest cooker that Taylors make. It will be fabulous when it is installed, but it is considerably bigger than the current cooker. Martin is keen to redo the galley cupboards and the wood that divides the saloon and the galley as well, as it is currently cheap stained plywood and does not look very good. A daunting prospect, redoing the whole galley, but exciting to plan. So now I am looking for pictures of other classic yachts' galleys for inspiration. We don't have a great deal of space to play with, but this just means we need to be cleverer with the design so we can fit everything in.

Home at last

Marelle was built at Deacons Boatyard in 1965, although she is a McGruer design (and McGruer had their own boatyard at the time in Scotland). So it is rather fitting that she should reside back at Deacons, at least for the moment. We are renting a berth on Y pontoon, which is not walk-ashore, but has the advantage of being relatively easy to get on and off.

Marelle is long-keeled as are most classic yachts, but also has her propellor situated above, aft and slightly offset from the rudder. This means of course that she will not steer unless under way, and due to her left handed propellor and slight offset has a mean kick to starboard in reverse. She is also a lot bigger and heavier than our previous yacht, so is going to take a bit of getting used to I suspect! Although even Ben Pester who owned Marelle for nearly 20 years said that she was not easy to maneouvre in marinas.

We timed moving Marelle up from Universal Marina to Deacons carefully, waiting for high tide as the current gets strong in the Hamble at Deacons - the river narrows and curves around a corner here and can get over 3 knots. We also enlisted Martin's brother and his friend Jason to help with lines.

Leaving the berth Universal Marina went smoothly - we reversed out, from being port side to, and the starboard kick kept us nicely away from the pontoon. A bit of indecision on my part meant we went a bit closer to a post than is ideal on the way out - Martin took over the steering at this point and we just squeezed past.

I tried a couple of turns before we moored up, and we had a dry run too. A couple of people from a neighbouring boat kindly offered to take our lines, which was helpful as even though there were no boats at the end of the pontoon, Marelle did not seem to want to make a tight turn, and we ended up with quite a steep angle of approach as a result. Martin said afterwards that I was being too hesitant and should have had Marelle going faster, but I was quite reluctant to do this as I was very conscious that it takes a while to stop her once she has momentum.

We have an Avon dinghy already, but Martin decided it would be more convenient if we could get a dinghy that we can leave at Deacons and just dedicate to getting to and from Y pontoon, so after some investigation I found a Navigator 400 on eBay, and with some tactical bidding - waiting right till the last 20 seconds - won it for £98!! Bargain. It duly arrived from Germany after a couple of days, and so far we are very impressed. It is nice and big, has an inflatable floor and seats, and oars, pump and pressure gauge are all included as well as a carry bag.

 

Launch

Marelle's launch was a bit of a scramble, and not at all like the romantic pictures you see on TV programmes and in films, with speeches and bubbly.

We had lifted her out at the beginning of March, and what followed was the driest spring on record. This combined with stripping her hull varnish with a heat gun, deliberately trying to get the wood as dry and degreased as possible so the varnish would bond effectively to the teak, and leaving her out of the water for much longer than was originally planned, for other jobs that materialised as if from nowhere, had resulted in her drying out too much.

Some of the splines Universal Metre Shed (now called Universal Yacht Care) had so carefully replaced in March started to move, and the beautiful varnish Martin had worked so hard on began to develop cracks.

It took a serendipitous visit from Scott Moody, of Moody Decking to warn us this was about to happen. We had invited him over to advise us on what should be done (later when we have saved up!) with Marelle's teak deck, which is looking very tired.

We immediately asked Universal Yacht Care for the earliest launch possible, but having told us a few days before that there was no shortage of slots, all of a sudden there was nothing available. After some negotiations with HYS they came back and offered us a launch the following Thursday, with the mast to be stepped the day before.

In the meantime we tried various methods of keeping Marelle as wet as possible - spraying the planks inside with river water, wetting the floor of the shed around the keel, and finally soaking rags and placing them against the hull inside the boat. Nothing seemed to prevent quite a few hairline cracks from forming in the varnish, along the new splines.

Due to the tortuous set up at Universal Marina for dealing with masts - see my earlier post - Marelle had to come out of the shed the day before her mast went back on rather than the same morning. Martin was worried about the direct sunshine making the situation with the splines even worse, so I fashioned a temporary cover for the hull out of old duvet covers. Meanwhile Universal Yacht Care ran around finishing jobs that had seemed to drag on for ages, like refitting the stanchions and the fairleads.

Martin painted Marelle's antifouling - we decided to try something new and went for Seajet Shogun, highly recommended on the YBW forum, having run out of our previous supply of International Micron 66. The waterline proved to be quite contentious - Martin wanted to lower it, as we had taken off a lot of weight from Marelle and the waterline had looked quite high originally. I had carefully measured the waterline right at the start, and used these measurements plus 5cm to mark up the new one. The professional painter at Universal then used a laser level on these marks, to mask up the line. Martin said this was done wrong, because as the hull curves 5cm measured against the hull at the midships point is not level with 5cm at the bow or stern, but he managed to sort it out and it looks quite smart in white. We used a thinner line than she had before, which sets off her lines better.

In total Marelle had been out of the water for 10 weeks. Looking back through the copious maintenance history, the longest she had been out before was for 7 weeks before Ben Pester sailed her to Cape Horn and back, and more usually was only out for 4 weeks per year. It was around now that I started to worry about the fact that Marelle only had manually operated bilge pumps... She has an electric bilge pump installed, but it was not operational before we bought her, and although I had looked at trying to get this fixed while she was out of the water, I had not managed it with everything else that had been going on.

I booked the launch day and the day after off work just in case, and asked Universal if we could borrow their salvage pump in case the worst happened.

Martin was working on the day Marelle was launched, so I was on my own. The plan is for me to do the steering for mooring up, while Martin does the ropes, but I drew the line at taking Marelle round to the marina berth on my own - the day was going to be stressful enough without adding this to it - and asked Universal to do it for me.

In the end the launch was uneventful - HYS were very careful and accommodating, letting us rest in the slings in the water for 10 minutes to make sure any water ingress was under control! - and the trip round to the berth was also fine.

The planks took up very quickly - initially there were 15 pumps every 10 minutes, but over a few hours this had gone to 15 pumps after an hour, then 2 hours, then overnight. And no leaks from the much smaller log hole either.

It's good that Marelle's back in the water, but just a shame that the circumstances aren't better.

Winch Wench

Now the decision here was whether to have a wife with big arm muscles, or whether to get bigger winches. Martin got some Andersen 52 winches.

These are lovely and shiny. We got the full stainless version, of course - well if you're going to do it, do it right! The plan is to use two of the Andersen 18s from Sarila (our previous yacht) as main sheet winches, at least for now.

That's the straightforward part over.

Here is a picture of the previous winches, which incidentally are incredibly heavy - and almost completely useless, as they don't grip the rope any more at all - even Martin said he couldn't use them.

The bases were very rusty, and really not nice. The wire winch, for the jib furling, just behind the primary winch in the picture, was particularly unstable, moving around just under slight hand pressure.

We decided to get them replaced. Cooney Fabrications, who had done work for us on Sarila before, were asked to quote. Now they did say they were busy and didn't really want the work, but their quote was more than the winches cost!

Plan B was to get a friend to make them. Unfortunately, although he came down from Warwickshire to measure the winch bases himself, and Universal Metre Shed (now Universal Yacht Care) helped with the design, they were made wrong - the holes are in the wrong place, and the angle of the top of the mainsheet winches does not match the primaries. This may be partly down to us asking him to prioritise some work for Cetewayo first - he made the new instrument panel for Cetewayo, as he has access to a laser cutting machine, and Martin wanted to help Universal Yacht Care, who couldn't find anyone to do this locally.

So frustratingly, even though Marelle is now back in the water, we still can't sail her as we are still sorting out the winch bases. Martin has asked Roy, a friend we met at Universal Marina, to take a look, and he is going to fix them for us.

I wanted to remove the wire winch altogether. I had read nasty stories about wire winches breaking people's arms, plus it did not look very nice. Martin didn't really share my opinion on this I don't think, and left it to me to find the equivalent Dyneema rope. I asked Universal Yacht Care for advice, and they said to make sure that the breaking strain was equivalent, but didn't give me any other guidance on size (diameter) of the rope. I checked the YBW forum for information, and found some posts talking about 8mm rope for jib furling, then on the ropelocker site found some Dyneema rope specially designed to replace wire winch wires, complete with a table that listed the breaking strains of wire and Dyneema. Based on this I ordered 24m of 8mm Dynaline rope. Big mistake. Apparently this is way over the top for jib furling rope, and won't fit on the furling drum. Who knew?

Martin took over, after pointing out how ridiculously useless I had been - several times, including to my Mum! - and went and got the right size and type of rope from a local chandlery. Well at least we have an emergency forestay should we ever need one, and the wire winch has gone.

Update May 2012:

At last... we have lovely new winches fitted!!! So exciting. Martin dry-fitted the first one, here it is in all its glory:

The bases had to have their holes filled in and re-drilled (or should that be milled) which Martin got done at a small engineering firm in Swanwick. Owen is fitting them for us, and this involves some teak padding for the mainsheet winches, as those bases don't quite fit against the cockpit sides as snugly as they should, and copious amounts of Sikaflex to stop any water getting underneath. Of course, nothing is ever straightforward, and with the new winch bases' metal being a lot thicker than the previous ones, now the original bolts are too short. We have used temporary ones in some places, but want to get the original bolts lengthened (or at least reuse the heads) as they are lovely and shiny, and unusual in that they have no thread or allen key slot cut into them.

Here comes the 21st century

I wanna dance with Harry Dean

Drive through Texas in a black limousine.

I want a piece of heaven before I die.

I wanna a pair of high heels that catch the lights up on the Ferris wheel, but what I really want I just can't buy.

Here comes the twenty-first century. It's gonna be much better for a girl like me.

- Debbie Harry: I Want That Man

Despite Ben Pester's protestations in his book “Through the Land of Fire” that Marelle was better without too much modern technology, we couldn't resist upgrading her instruments to a full set of Tack Tick, and I got a bit carried away and added a Digital Yacht iAIS to link everything up to my iPad.

To be fair she did already have a Furuno GPS and Icom VHF on board, which we have kept, along with a broken Navtex, and a Seafarer depth sounder and repeater (an ancient thing that beeped incessantly and needed “re-tuning” every 10 seconds it seemed) which we have definitely not kept. Then of course we still have the Electrawind and Electravane wind instruments.

The Tack Tick instruments have a couple of advantages for classic yachts - they are wireless, and believe me there are already enough wires on Marelle, I think she still has wires from every generation of instruments she has carried, including her original B&G instruments - and they are solar powered, sparing the battery power that we think is in a delicate condition, at least on the domestic battery. Another job, another day...

However there is no dedicated package for classic yachts from Tack Tick. The cruising package is not right, as it doesn't include the triducer (combined log/depth/temperature), sensible to minimise the number of holes in your boat, or the bronze housing, essential for wooden hulls. And the racing package is too over the top, at least for Marelle. Martin tried to persuade the Tack Tick people at the London boat show that they should offer a package for the classic yacht fraternity, but to no avail. Too small a market, apparently.

What we ended up with, was the bronze housing, the triducer and wind vane with analogue and dual digital displays, the remote display and NMEA interface, and for fun mainly, and so I can see how well Martin is sailing Marelle, the race compass.

I now know much more than I should about wiring and NMEA.

As ever, nothing is straightforward, and for some reason the hole for the previous log, that we wanted to reuse for the Tack Tick (actually an Airmar) triducer, was mahoosive. No bother, Universal fixed it, very nicely too, and then we discovered it was also at the wrong angle.

Deadrise, or how much the hull slopes at the point where the triducer goes through, is it turns out, quite important for accurate depth readings. Makes sense when you think about it, but why did we have to tell Universal Metre Shed (now called Universal Yacht Care) this, rather than them telling us?

We ended up with a nicely streamlined protrusion on the hull, so that we could be as close to vertical as possible with the triducer.

The triducer has to be connected to the hull transmitter, which needs to be powered, although it does have a battery for back up purposes. It also has to be mounted at least 50cm above the waterline, and not in a cupboard or surrounded by any metal - although with Marelle I did want to put it somewhere reasonably unobtrusive. A further restriction is the length of the cable from the triducer - 3m sounds like a lot, until you have to route it behind and around all sorts of things. I ended up putting the hull transmitter at the forward end of the shelf in the saloon on the starboard side. This has the advantage of being partially hidden by the shelf, and is an easy cable run to the triducer, which is under the saloon table. Running a power cable across to it without taking the interior apart was more challenging. We ended up using a coax cable that was already in place, connected to a B&G(!) wiring box. At some point the wiring on Marelle is going to need serious attention I think.

Next up was the NMEA interface - more requirements here - connect to power, mount on a transverse bulkhead. I have put it next to the switch panel on the chart table, although with this and the hull transmitter I have not screwed them on yet just in case they need to be moved.

Finally the iAIS from Digital Yacht. I connected the power for this to the GPS power output on the Tack Tick NMEA interface, mainly because there was no spare power on the switch panel and I didn't want to disturb too much wiring. I then connected the NMEA input wires to the output from the Tack Tick NMEA interface. Must find some labels at some point, because currently the “Depth” switches on the Tack Tick hull transmitter, and the “Navtex” switches on the Tack Tick NMEA interface and the iAIS.

After a bit of research, I figured out that the Furuno GPS that was already on the boat, contained an NMEA output in the power cable. Checking where this power cable went into the switch panel, sure enough there were two extra wires there. Very carefully, I opened the power cable up where it passed the Tack Tick NMEA interface and pulled out the NMEA cables, and connected them to the GPS inputs on the NMEA interface.

So far, so good.

Everything switches on, and I managed to get the iPad connected to the wifi network created by the Digital Yacht iAIS easily - just going to Settings, Wi-Fi and highlighting the DY... network. There's no security on the network - guess it doesn't need it for the AIS information, but this has interesting implications with connected wireless devices (computers, ipads etc) in a marina.

Even better, using the Digital Yachts free app I can see AIS signals!!! Exciting stuff. I also splashed out on the iNavX chartplotter app, with associated UK charts from X Traverse. Got this to connect up to the iAIS too - after a bit of fiddling - but so far I haven't been able to see the instrument data from Tack Tick in either of the apps.

Really not sure why this is. I guess I need to check the connections and investigate further when I'm next on board - I'll update this post after further testing!

Update

Finally got around to re-testing this, switching everything on carefully and in sequence - first the Tack Tick hull transmitter power, then the Tack Tick NMEA interface power, then the Furuno GPS, then the iAIS, then switching on the Tack Tick instruments themselves via the remote display (you only have to switch one instrument on and it wakes all the rest up). Lastly the iPad - went to Settings, Wi-Fi and highlighted the DY... network. Started up the iNavX app, looked in the TCPIP NMEA screen and woohoo! - here is a lot more NMEA data than before.

 

So far so good. Next to the instruments screen, and hey presto! - here is all the data!!!

For reference here is the NMEA interface with the connections I made. The blue and white wire come from the Furuno GPS, and the green and yellow, and thin red and black, go to the iAIS.

Next I tried seeing what happens if I switched off various things, e.g. the Tack Tick instruments - all performed as expected, i.e. the iNavX just displayed the remaining position and AIS data.

The only thing I can think of that could perhaps have been causing the problems before, is the Location Services setting, which I now have switched off in the iNavX TCPIP NMEA client.

Now off to learn how to use the iNavX plotter!

 

Update June 2012:

After a long period of not using the instruments, I switched on the power to the hull transmitter, and nothing happened – no depth or log reading. I did have a nasty feeling this might happen, as I remembered reading that the hull transmitter contains an internal battery. The Tack Tick website claims that the hull transmitter will power off before its internal battery completely dies, so that it remains rechargable when power is applied later, and recommends to “connect it to volts” for 12 – 24 hours to allow it to recharge. Fingers crossed...

Cockpit conundrum

co·nun·drum/kəˈnəndrəm/Noun

1. A confusing and difficult problem or question.

2. A question asked for amusement, typically one with a pun in its answer; a riddle.

I think I mean the first definition; but actually at times the second seems more appropriate. Well sometimes you have to laugh, or you would cry...

When we started this refit of Marelle we weren't expecting the transom to look so pretty once we had removed the Aries windvane, and varnished, and gilded the name. Our original plan had been to put the Aries back on, but we couldn't bring ourselves to put it back on and cover up all that beauty. Perhaps inhaling all the thinners is getting to us!

Given we were already replacing the winch bases - more of that in another posting later - we decided to strip and varnish the cockpit, and remove the Aries track next to the wheel, and repair the corner piece the Aries lines had been fed through.

Easier said than done. Stripping the cockpit was really hard work, using a heat gun as Martin had done on the hull, and scrapers, followed by sanding, sanding and more sanding.

All the fittings were taken off, and what seemed like hundreds of holes were dowelled and filled.

Here are some pictures of the corner repair: 

 

The original corner pieces had steel reinforcement, but this was all that was protecting the cockpit corners from the potential shock of an ill-timed jibe. Martin was not happy that this would be strong enough, so we got the corners extended out, with an inner piece added as well to “sandwich” the wood together. The stainless steel work that has been done looks fabulous, with the added bonus of getting the original corner pieces polished up.

Oh yes and we have also removed the gas box from the aft deck, and the cockpit fold out seat that was rotting away (a later addition in softwood!).

We ran out of time to do the varnish in the cockpit before we had to get Marelle back in the water, so most of the cockpit varnish has been done outside. I am now up to 8 coats of Epifanes PP Extra; Martin wants the same number of coats as the hull so there is a way to go yet. It is nicer sanding and varnishing outside, but obviously quite weather dependent so it's going rather slowly.

Mind you, the second steel corner piece still isn't fitted yet...

So the riddle/difficult questions are:

• would we have started the job, if we knew what it would take?
• why do all jobs on boats multiply exponentially, but only after they are started?

Update June 2012:

Corner pieces, mainsheet blocks and winches all fitted.

 

Mast be an easier way...

Way back when we had the survey done just before buying Marelle, the surveyor (Tony Head, great guy) tested the antiquated wind instruments (EMI Marine Electrawind and Electravane), and said how nice it would be to keep them in place if we did fit a modern set. Oh how much trouble has that statement caused us!

First of all, Universal sent someone up the mast before it was stepped to remove the wind vane. Now this was done, and billed to us, as being necessary to protect the wind vane during the process of taking the mast down. However, in doing this they broke one of the cups off.

Try as I might, I could not find a replacement. We tried Foulkes & Sons, where they had all the bits except the wind cups, and someone helpfully said they could make a new one for £100 - ouch! We scoured Beaulieu Boat Jumble, eBay, general internet, visited local plastics companies, but no luck. Universal themselves told us that we would be better off removing the old instruments altogether - handy that, seeing as they had broken them.

Meanwhile, the actual stepping of the mast. Now this should be straightforward - it is an operation carried out hundreds of times a year, and the basics of it are surely not that different whether the boat is 1 year old or 45 years old - Marelle even has a deck stepped mast as well which must be easier to remove than a keel stepped one. Indeed, most boatyards offer this at a fixed fee - £100 at Deacons, or even less than that next door at the Elephant. Sadly for us, stepping a mast has become horrendously complicated at Universal Marina. HYS are the incumbent boat lift operators, and a few years ago used to also have a crane so they could do masts as well. This was great, but unfortunately the crane bit the dust and HYS have not replaced it - Universal Marina is not their main marina, just a secondary outpost. So, now Universal Metre Shed (now called Universal Yacht Care)have to book another company to bring a crane, and use up two of their own people to supervise it, and coordinate the timing of the boat movements by HYS with the crane company's availability, and all of this costs a lot of money, which they pass on to - yes you guessed it - the unsuspecting boat owner. £508.20 to be precise. Just to take the mast down (and break the wind vane).

Tony had advised replacement of the tricolour light at the top of the mast, and I wanted to put an LED light on to save on power, as the tricolour is used while sailing. After a lot of investigation, I came to the conclusion that Lopolight, although expensive, were the best, and duly ordered a full set of Lopolights for Marelle. Unfortunately, Martin did not agree that the rest of the lights should be replaced so I sent them back. Here's the original light fitting, with the attachment for the Electravane windvane at the base of the light fitting, covered in tape.

The new Tack Tick wind vane was mounted on a new metal plate welded on to the arm holding the VHF aerial, and Universal Yacht Care removed the light fitting from just above the Electravane attachment point, and put the Lopolight on top of that, with a spacer block to raise it up an inch or so. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of this, but it did look quite neatly done. They also put a new fitting on the light/Electravane wiring, although both had been working fine before. Doing this has shortened the wire that runs through the mast, so that now it's back up I have another job to connect in a second piece of 12 core wire, to get things back to as they were.

I had also got a special top for the Lopolight, with a cut-out and a stalk to fit a Windex to. We tried fitting this, but the Windex arrow fouled the VHF aerial, so took it back off again. Not impressed with the boatyard's solution - “oh we can just bend the aerial out, we do that regularly it will be fine”.

The worst part of this is Martin says it all has to be redone because the light is not high enough up to be seen from deck. We'll find out for sure when I have connected up the wiring - I have got all the bits now, the extra piece of 12 core, and lots and lots of connectors. I am a bit worried it will not look very good as the 12 connections make it a bit bulky (it runs from the mast across the heads ceiling and into a cupboard). I'll do the best I can though - it's not worth getting an electrician in.

Next Universal said there was a broken bottle screw, and to find it they had to service all the bottle screws on the mast. I was tasked with finding a replacement but I could not find one the right size in the spares on the boat, so was a bit worried it would cause a problem - but magically the broken bottle screw got fixed! Apparently there was some debate over whether it was indeed broken, and in any case now it's fine.

A new set of wooden chocks were made for the base of the mast. The original ones had been smashed to pieces getting the mast off; a problem that Tony had predicted, as the wood had swelled and was holding water against the mast, causing some corrosion. I am not sure what to do with this new set, as they have been left all different heights which does not look great. Perhaps I should make a cover for the base of the mast so they don't get as wet.

Finally, the mast went back up, without either the old Electravane windvane, or the new Tack Tick one, and to cap it all in the process Universal lost the wire halyard up the inside of the mast.

We kept Marelle at Universal Marina for two weeks before they put the Tack Tick wind vane on and retrieved the halyard. We are still working on fixing the Electravane windvane.

Finishing touches - real gold!

The final tally of coats of varnish on the hull was 17!  11 coats of Epifanes PP Extra, and 6 coats of Epifanes Clear Gloss.  Not quite as many as we had wanted, but time was running out and we were having real problems with other people creating dust in the shed just as we were trying to put varnish top coats on - you would think that if you'd watched someone painstakingly prepare the wood for varnishing, hoover, wipe down and very carefully start to apply a coat of varnish, that you would think twice before switching on a dirty vacuum not 6 feet away - but no.  Apparently the rib (on a trailer) they were hoovering couldn't be wheeled outside the shed and cleaned there, in case it rained... 

Next time we might do it differently, and put Marelle in an individual tent the way they have the boats at Deacons.

Despite the problems Martin got a fantastic finish on the topsides.


To do this justice, we decided - well I decided and persuaded Martin! - to do the name on the transom, and the cove line, in real gold leaf rather than using vinyl tape or paint.  This was a new technique for us to learn, and we had the boatyard help us by carving out the name a bit deeper in the transom as it was only lightly scored before.

I did some research online, and ordered everything from Wrights of Lymm who were very helpful.  


I got the 24 carat extra thick gold leaf in transfer books (medium press), for easier application.  Ended up getting 5 books - having calculated I would need approximately 4, I panicked and ordered another 1 just in case, and now have a whole book left over :-)


As its going to be outside, I used oil based size - the 3 hour version of Le Franc Charbonelle.  I had two goes at getting the right colour of gesso - the base paint that goes underneath the size so if some leaf does come off it doesn't look so obvious.  The first one I ordered, yellow ochre, was quite dark, so I got some naples yellow and that was perfect.


Finally I got a couple of size 2 squirrel hair mops, and a 12mm ox hair brush, with a tin to keep it all in.  Oh and a very helpful book Practical Gilding - seeing as the people at the boatyard hadn't done this before either!  


A professional painter at the boatyard masked off the cove line and name with 3M fine line tape, and we lightly sanded the cove line and the name with 240 grit sandpaper.  We then painted on the gesso, and when it was dry, went over it with scotchbrite and then painted on the 3 hour size.  The Universal Metre Shed people actually used the mop to apply the size, and the ox hair brush to press the gold leaf, which I now realise is the wrong way round! but it seemed to work ok at the time.  They did the complicated bits, like the name and the shapes at the end of the cove line.


I spent a Saturday doing the cove lines themselves - I did not realise just how long this would take! - a good 7 hours in total, and a lot of concentration.  First I painted on the size - I managed to get pretty good coverage with this but in hindsight I would have tried to get just a bit more on, as there were a couple of areas that had tiny bits missed.  While this dried, I sat down with the transfer books and some scissors and talcum powder, and cut each sheet from 4 books into 3 strips roughly the size of the cove line, which left a thin strip over for patching up.  Each sheet is 80 x 80mm, and there are 25 sheets per book, so this took a while!   


Armed with the cut strips, and the ox hair brush, I carefully bent each strip to match the concave cove line, and applied each one by pressing lightly from the centre out, and then using the brush to apply pressure to finish off.  This went really well as long as I lined up the strip carefully to start with - the gold would stick straight away to any size it contacted, but the danger was the paper the gold was on could also stick to the size and stop the gold sticking, if the strip was moved slightly during application.  Fortunately this only happened in one tiny place but it was very frustrating as there was nothing I could do at the time to fix it.  I slightly overlapped each piece, and went over any missed patches with the thinner strips of gold leaf left over from cutting the 3 strips out of each sheet.


Finally I had finished one side, and then realised it would have been a better idea to have only put size on one side at a time, as I had been going 2 hours and was convinced the size on the second side was starting to get too dry.  Testing it, it seemed just about ok still, so I decided to go for it and speeded up on this side.  It was a relief to finish!

As soon as I had finished the second side, I checked over all of it and then took the masking tape off - I hate leaving masking tape on as I have had problems in the past with it taking off the surface it is attached to, and it would have been heartbreaking if it had damaged Martin's varnish.  Luckily it came off ok, pulling back on itself so the angle to the surface was small - but I am glad I took it off when I did as I could feel it starting to pull in places.


I am so pleased with the finished job.  I decided to leave the gold uncoated - some advice was to use size over the top, some to put on a coat of varnish, some to use lacquer - but I figured that I had gold leaf left over to fix any repairs needed during the year, and that any coating would dull the shininess of the gold which is the whole point of it!  All in all it hadn't been any more expensive than antifoul, and a lot more rewarding to apply.

About Marelle

Marelle is a 36 foot teak classic yacht designed by McGruer in 1965 and built by Deacons Boatyard, on the Hamble River.

We bought her in November 2010 and brought her back home to the Hamble.  We are currently working on a major refit at Universal Metre Shed.

 We wanted to re-varnish Marelle, as she had Epifanes RapidCoat varnish applied which includes a stain that had hidden the grain of the wood.  The surveyor had noticed some splines that had moved - this is where the glue holding the spline to the neighbouring planks fails - and while not structural, he advised us to get the splines re-made before re-varnishing as any subsequent movement would damage the finish of the varnish.

Martin had a month off work in March 2011, and stripped all the varnish off from the hull, then sanded very carefully and thoroughly.  Owen from the Metre Shed then re-splined Marelle's hull in new teak splines - a very skilled job.  There were more splines needed than we had originally thought, as tends to happen, but they needed doing and unless you know where they were, you now can't tell.


While we had the varnish stripped off, we decided to get the other damaged areas repaired - at the stem a previous repair was redone in afrormosia to match the original wood, and on the bow a piece of mahogany used in a former repair had rotted so we had it replaced in teak along with a repair to the toe-rail at the bow - only one side needed doing so we now have teak to port and mahogany to starboard at the bow roller!

The other major repair was the starboard toe-rail under the bronze genoa track.  Previous damage - a split in the toe-rail from the forces acting on the track - had been roughly repaired with the track simply screwed back in place.  The whole track was removed, and the damaged toe-rail cut out and replaced with a large piece of teak that had to be colour-matched to the 1965 teak around it, and shaped to fit the curve of the boat in three directions.  While doing this, it was discovered that the bronze track was actually bolted through the toe-rail into galleries accessible behind cut-outs in the cove line, as this picture shows.

We have also taken all the stanchions off and had new wooden bases made, and new bolts.  The survey highlighted a few that were allowing water to leak through the bases, but we decided to get them all done as we wanted to varnish the toerail and the margin board to protect these areas properly, and get them looking good alongside the re-varnished hull.  Some stanchions have had to be replaced, as they were so battered it was not worth cleaning them up.  We got all the stanchions and metal bases cleaned and polished - and found that the bases are actually bronze so have come up very shiny!  We are still debating how to re-fix the bolts for the stanchions so that they are easier to remove than they were this time.

After consulting widely on the right varnish to use for teak - notoriously difficult to get anything to stick to - we have gone for a thorough de-greasing with Epifanes Spray Thinner followed by 11 coats of Epifanes PP Extra, then as many coats as we can get on of Epifanes Clear Gloss (we are currently up to 3 of this but hope to get to 9 by the time Marelle goes back in the water).  Here's a photo of how she's looking now.