Is this finally the home straight?

I was lucky enough to learn about a privately organised crane appointment this week, on 26 May, which I gladly accepted. So I had enough time to get the boat ready for sea and to go into the water without any completely screwed-up compromises - but then what?

But not so fast, what happened before: On Friday last week, the boat was moved from a marina storage trestle to my own harbour trailer. It stood on the trestle so that I could also work on the keel from below, otherwise it would havecontinue to rust from the sole. So I first filled the keel from underneath and then painted it with a 2k primer.

But: no matter what a boat is standing on, there are always points that are not accessible. Normally, this is the keel sole and the pads with which the supports press against the hull. Because the keel sole had to be accessible on the storage trestle, we had the boat propped up, i.e. jacked up with bracing timbers, so that the actual keel came free. Where the hull rested on the bracing, it was of course not accessible.

Since Friday, Antares has been back on its harbour trailer, so the places that were not accessible on the trestle are now accessible, but other places are covered. The keel sole doesn't bother me here, but the four supports do. Because: now at least five coats of Gelshield have to be applied, a 2k epoxy-based barrier coating that will protect the fibreglass fabric from water penetration in the future. Gelshield is available in grey and green, which are applied alternately so that it is always easy to see whether the current layer has been applied with good coverage. The colour of the underwater hull therefore has changed again and again in the last few days, first grey, then green, then grey again, green again and finally, yesterday, grey again. This means that all five recommended coats have been applied, although not everywhere, because as I said, there are places that were inaccessible. And there is the skeg, which I had to repair.

Oh, the skeg, I haven't spoken about that yet. The skeg is the front part of the rudder that is firmly attached to the boat. It absorbs part of the lateral forces acting on the boat and the rudder, stabilises the axis of the rudder and protects the rudder from foreign object impacts, for example if I should run aground

The transition from the skeg to the hull can thus be subject to quite highl stresses and although the actual attachment of the skeg is ensured by a thick glue up in the hull, it certainly does no harm to stabilise it from the outside. One of the previous owners also thought of this and laminated a sleeve on it.

Unfortunately, this work was really incredibly poorly done, as the pictures hopefully clearly document. If this sleeve provided any kind of stability at all, it was only through the fact that large amounts of putty supported itself against the hull, but not by adhering to the underlying fabric.

So I removed the old layers completely down to the hull and the fabric on the skeg and laminated them again. In two steps I laminated two layers of 300g and two layers of 165g glass fabric over the skeg and hull and one layer around the front of the skeg to stabilise the whole. The resulting eight layers of bonding are fewer than the 13 to 20 layers I counted before, but this time it is not only more stable fabric, but also fabric that has actually been impregnated with resin and, incidentally, epoxy instead of polyester resin, which is per se many times stronger.

But: due to this work, the skeg was a bit behind the rest of the underwater hull, and as an exposed laminate, it first had to be treated with Gelshield plus according to the specifications. When the boat was moved to the trailer, the laminate was still open, so Gelshield Plus was the first step, while the first layer of Gelshield 200 was already applied to the actual hull.

The current status is that I have applied the necessary five layers of Gelshield over almost the entire hull. As described above, the skeg with the rudder and some of the contact surfaces are still missing. Basically, however, the underwater hull is now watertight and I can go into the water on Friday without any major problems. But that's not true. Because:

There are still two hull openings. Firstly, the old depth gauge transducer, which protruded from the hull at an angle of 45° at the level of the toilet on the starboard side, finally had to go. It was an eternal nuisance because there was always the possibility of tearing it off with the belt when hauling out, which would of course have been unfortunate if that had happened when craning in. Water ingress could have been the result. So away with it. I noticed how tight it was, because the thread holding the sensor from the inside had already broken off the head and the head was only held by a (really strong) adhesive on the outside of the fuselage. Now there's just a hole in the place, but I've already prepared a ring using the tried-and-tested 3D mould-printing-and-into-GFK-laminate method, which will now be glued in place, a Lowrance temperature sensor will go in there (which is worth its own story) and then hopefully there will be peace. The parts are all there already.

It's a bit more exciting aft, where the NASAMarine log sensor is located. I had only installed it last year and probably didn't do a very good job of it, at least I had a small amount of water ingress there after the watering, which I dealt with from the inside with a large amount of Sikaflex. I wanted to do it right this time, so I tried to remove the base sleeve in which the sensor sits. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that without destroying the sleeve, because the union nut sits bombproof and Sikaflex in the thread not only seals but also sticks really well. However, because the electromagnetic log (i.e. without the paddle wheel) not only works really well, but is also brand new, spare parts, such as this ground sleeve, are difficult to deliver, with a delivery time of about 30 working days. The sensor with the ground sleeve, on the other hand, is available immediately. The ground sleeve itself costs just under 40€, the sensor with everything just over 200€, but I can't wait six weeks (by the way: thanks Brexit!) and so a complete sensor should be on its way to me and a sleeve should also turn up here at some point. So I'll take the sleeve out of the sensor pack, put the new ground sleeve back in at some point and try to sell it again, because nobody needs two loggers.

So it looks like tomorrow evening (Thursday) I will really be ready to put the boat in the water, but it will be a precision landing.

But that will not be the end of it

Hopefully, I will then be able to lie ashore at the neighbouring SVT for another two or three weeks in order to provide the remaining areas with Gelshield and apply my Coppercoat antifouling. I don't even dare to think about it yet, but in order to be able to do this completely, the boat will have to be moved once in between, because of the supports already mentioned above.

In the end, however, it should hopefully be worth all the effort, and unfortunately there have not been so many beautiful sailing days this year, so the loss is limited.