Another milestone in the preparation phase has been finished – and we had our first outing under sail. Although short and only half a mile offshore, we motor-sailed from our current home Port Ginesta past the centre of Barcelona to Port Forum, one of the marinas to the north of Barcelona.
Unfortunately the travel lift in our shipyard at Port Ginesta couldn’t cope with the 7m width of our Belize and we had to find an alternative. After weeks of collecting and comparing quotes for the work we wanted done and a last minute set-back, because the shipyard we had chosen refused to let in our team of workers we ended up lifting Paso Doble onto the dry at Port Forum. Here are some pictures - out on a grey day and back in looking shiny on a sunny day.
Well, we ended up with a complete English team – Barry and Guy from Watertight Marine doing anti fouling and engine work, Gary doing the fibre glass repairs and Paul and John doing the polishing. A welcome change to practicing Spanish all the time ….. if you know what I mean.
The list of major works was not very extensive and mainly preventative maintenance, but we decided to get it done now while we are in the swing of it. The existing anti fouling looked still pretty good, but because the boat was inactive for some time now there were quite some fury attachments on the under body. Here’s the before and after comparison.
The other major repair was changing the rubber seals on both sail drives. Again, there was no leakage or apparent damage, but the engine and sail drive manufacturer Yanmar advised us to change them anyway after 7 years of relative easy and little work. They still looked almost impeccable as they came out, but there might have been some internal erosion due to inactivity combined with water conditions. The anodes and a few more gaskets were changed and also an exhaust elbow connected to one of the heat exchangers. Best done now rather than in an emergency situation in some remote and exotic place without access to a certified mechanic or spare parts.
The rest was putting in an inlet valve for our water maker and tailoring in a hatch to close the hole at the transom, where the life raft was originally sitting. We needed this spot to put in the additional diesel tank. Accessibility to the life raft was dubious anyway as we virtually needed an hour of back braking pulling and tugging to extract the life raft from its original spot. After several weeks of moving it around on the boat we finally decided where to put it. You’ll see ….. much better. In fact, we don’t ever intend to use it so we could have left it where it was – hadn’t we needed the space. Not to forget the polishing – we had mixed weather and it rained 3 out of the 8 days on the dry, hence the job provided quite some challenges with the unstable weather conditions. And of course the many little jobs like putting up a wifi aerial at the mast head and grounding plates for the HF radio and finding a spot for all the new electronic gadgets and more.
But in the end it all worked out and we had ‘only’ one day of delay. As she went back into the water she looked spectacular and we could notice the difference in the water on the way back. The clean and smooth hull with the self-polishing anti fouling paint added another knot of speed at the same revolutions. The sail drives didn’t leak and neither did the bulkhead valve. So all in all we are happy and together with the 'hired crew' on the way back to Port Ginesta we enjoyed a sunset sail, finished off with a full moon eclipse while having a few ‘coldies’ back on the mooring.
