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.