Back to Black

Where Next?
Bob Williams
Sun 15 Aug 2010 23:25

I got the first coat of antifouling on this morning. Rain was forecast for the afternoon so I had one eye to the north as I painted to watch for any rain clouds heading Sylph’s way. Fortunately none came until quite late in the afternoon so I was easily able to finish the job. The only supplier of antifouling in Puerto Montt, Sherwin Williams, provides three colours - white, blue or black. Christophe was trying to persuade me to go for the white but this was a little to adventurous for me and I decided to stick with your basic black. The results:

 

 

 

The old girl is looking pretty good if I do say so myself.

Once the painting was complete I moved inside under the cockpit for another squeezy job, re-installing the chain for the steering system. I did not expect any problems with this as the new chain was identical to the old, but for some reason whenever you change something there has to be a glitch of some description. In this case the new chain having no wear in it was a little tighter, I had to use some light rope to draw it together to get the joining link to fit, but then when I went to turn the wheel the steering jammed after only an eighth of a turn of the wheel. It seemed I had a bit of an alignment problem between the two cogs which with the slightly tighter chain meant the links wanted to pull themselves off the smaller forward cog and in the process jammed up the steering. Definitely not good, not something I would like to happen as I am manoeuvring out of the marina amongst some pretty expensive craft. After a bit of poking around I decided the simplest solution was to try and move the lower intermediate cog up a bit to improve the alignment. As you can imagine after having been in situ probably untouched for over 30 years the cog was reluctant to move. But with a little persuasion from an iron bar and the American fine adjustment tool (i.e. a hammer), I managed to coax it up enough to free the system. Now after a liberal coat of grease the steering system seems to be working a treat. Nonetheless I shall keep the old chain for a little while just in case.

 

Note the condensation on the underside of the cockpit. It gets pretty wet back here in a cold climate.

A curry is simmering away on the stove top for dinner tonight. Smells good.

All is well.

Bob Cat:

Personally curry does nothing for me, its pungent odour permeating my living space only serves to remind me of the absence of more fragrant piscatorial aromas, such as tuna, sole, plaice, salmon, perch, pike, snook, barramundi, whiting, eel, wrass, parrotfish, butterfish, flatfish, pursefish, sunfish, globefish, flying fish, … basically any god-damned fish. Meowargh - I am torturing myself. Mercy, mercy. I better go and have a little …. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz