Refit Part Two: Painted decks and glassed keel

Just a quick update for those who are interested! We have finished painting the decks and are busy replacing all the fittings. This will probably take us the rest of the week and we will move back on board this weekend as once all the fittings into the living spaces are in we can clean up inside those areas. The guys in the yard have glassed in the majority of the keel (we will need to move the yacht to get the last little bits). This was done instead of removing the keel bolts as we were quoted $16,000 just to remove the bolts, which involved ripping half the boat apart and possibly cutting holes in the side! We had a slight hiccup painting the decks as we were given a tin of paint that was incorrectly labelled and was the wrong colour (somewhat ironic as we had gone with that brand of paint because of colour…). All was sorted in the end and we are quite happy with the end result (although it’s still not teak!).

Refit: Part One

I make no apologies for this update as though it will bore some people silly (if you’re looking for photos of interesting anchorages and wildlife please stop reading now and check back in a few months!) I have been talking to quite a few people recently who are quite interested in the whole refit thing. So here goes a brief description of the major stuff we’ve done so far (I imagine even those interested in things boaty are not too fascinated with jobs such as overhauling the toilet so I’ll mostly keep to the big stuff!)

First things first and we hauled out. We spent about 2 weeks doing interior bits (painting lockers etc) and preparing the boat while we waited for the shed to become free.

In our feline withdrawal state we were glad to see that the yard provided not only five strays (we’re working on getting friendly with these, bribery has met with some success depending on how hungry they are at the time!) but that one of the boats has a resident cat as seen in the picture with Jim. Once in the shed we removed all the deck fittings and began to strip the teak off. We started on Friday and had the majority of the teak gone by Monday (although the last stuff around the edges was some of the hardest to remove). On Monday the boat builder started. Spencer was really great to work with as he appreciated that we wanted to do as much as possible ourselves and while we wanted to do a good job this was always going to be within the constraints of a budget.

The before photo
Removing teak and fittings
and the teaks all but gone...
We found the odd surprise…that’s not a ventilation hole!!
The next step was to cut out the few rotten bits (the bits we knew about were not as bad as we thought and we only found one bit we didn’t know about – shown in the photo above). This aft section needed a bit of work to rebuild including scarfing in a new piece of beam. The gaps were filled with 19mm ply and then the decks sanded and epoxy faired before a layer of 9mm ply was laid over all. In the photo Tori is making up a template for one of the ply sections. Note no more holes in the deck. In the background of this photo you can see Jim trying to tie the shed tarpaulins down to stop them blowing away in the worst of the storms!
Fibreglassing the decks
We have noticed that most nights we have visitors who usually leave their mark in one way or another…
In case you are wondering we are not living aboard at the moment. We shifted into a one bedroom unit (read a room above someone’s garage) just before we moved into the shed.

Why we’re not living aboard!