Winter. Tasks.

Antares is back on land, even though there's still a lot of water visible under her in the photo. I hope the parking spot dries up a bit; at the moment, there's still a lot of mud and sludge.

As always, a few tasks are lined up for the winter, and this time is no different. Some are necessary, some are becoming increasingly practical, and some I just want to do.

In the "must-do" category, unfortunately, falls the task of dealing with the underwater hull again, particularly the rudder blade. During the last dive, I had already noticed that there were bumps on the rudder. Now, on land, I took a closer look, and sure enough, they were water-filled, and the water smelled like vinegar.
How can that be? I subjected the entire boat to an extensive and thorough osmosis treatment just over a year ago! Honestly, I don't know. When sanding down the blisters, it became clear that they hadn’t penetrated the laminate but seemed to be situated between the Gelshield and the old gelcoat. That doesn’t really make sense. What I can imagine is that perhaps I didn’t sand the rudder sufficiently, so the Gelshield wasn’t able to form a proper bond with the underlying layer. But why the water got in at all, and why it smells like vinegar? No idea. In any case, I’ll sand all of it down completely and rebuild it from scratch.

Not quite in the "must-do" category, but definitely practical are the next two tasks:

After noticing during last winter season that the starboard sheet winch had been rather clumsily "repaired" at some point, it quickly became clear: new winches are needed. However, it turns out that winches with a power ratio of 20 are apparently quite rare. The usual suspects, like Harken and Antal, offer 15 or 30 winches, but the closest match to 20 is the 18/18ST from Andersen. This model also fits almost perfectly in terms of dimensions, as its base has a diameter of 120 mm—just like my current winches from the apparently no longer existing manufacturer, Parat.

If I'm already buying new winches, I'm considering whether I should go all the way and opt for two-speed winches (28ST) instead of single-speed ones (18ST). The base is only 5 mm larger (so 2.5 mm in radius) and should fit. I've printed two base templates, one for the 18ST and one for the 28ST, and I'll take a look at them on board before making a decision.

The other practical task involves replacing the through-hull fittings and ball valves. The old ones are almost certainly the originals installed when the boat was built, and the material has aged and become brittle over time. Additionally, three of the four fittings are standard "water taps." While they are frost-resistant, they don’t always close smoothly like ball valves and tend to be a bit finicky. Now, I’m planning to use the plastic components from Truedesign. These are long-term stable and frost-resistant, which is especially important to me since I originally intended to keep Antares in the water this year.

The "I want" category includes finally sorting out the lighting, and it’s starting to look like this might actually happen. I began working on this quite some time ago, a projectI inherited years ago, porting it to new hardware and developing new firmware. This took quite a while because several bugs cropped up, the porting to a different microcontroller was quite challenging, and I didn’t have much experience with projects of this size.

Once all of this is finally finished, I will solder tiny controllers to LED strips, place them behind the trim boards on the boat, power them with 12V, and be able to control them from my phone or the onboard systems. That way, I won’t just have the choice between dark, dim, bright, and too bright anymore.

I'm sure there will be one project or another that comes my way, and the possibilities won’t run out.