Saturday 9 & Sunday 10 Oct, re-launch 2021, HHN days 10 & 11: A full weekend on the thru-hull project. Completed by Sunday evening.

These last 2 days were a bit of a blur when it comes to details of what we did and when, so I combine the weekend into one blog. But before launching into our activities:
… it’s our anniversary! Six years ago, we wed in Bucharest. Since then, each year, we seem to be in places not exactly romantic! First year was sailing somewhere in the Med with a rough sea. Second year was a very rough sailing in the Atlantic, on the way to Lanzarote. Third year was on the boat in Annapolis. Fourth year in a plane coming back to the boat. Fifth year locked down in Bucharest due to Covid, and this year glamping in a boat yard! Ooopsy, what sort of a husband am I???

Saturday morning, we finished bonding in the last 2 of 5 backing plates, using the same routine as yesterday. Then while waiting for the epoxy to harden I decided to inject grease into each of the new seacock valves. I also need to do this for all the other new valves on the boat, which we installed back in 2019. So thought it best to experiment on these new ones first before heading down to the others which are in various dark and inaccessible corners in the bilges.

But to do that, I needed a grease gun that worked. Frustratingly, mine seemed to pump with the first stroke, then stop. Eventually I manage to get it primed and filled the seacocks with grease. Once grease-injected, I could really feel the difference in the ease of lever movement. Motivated by this I took all the gear into the engine room where we have 6 (yes 6!) seacocks. But just into the first one, the damned grease gun stopped working again, so the job deferred till I can buy myself a decent one. Life is simply too short to be faffing around with a cheap Chinese grease gun, getting oneself covered in marine grease!

Then I get a call from Mike, our neighbour on Dark & Stormy – a Hallberg Rassy 53. Coincidentally he is also changing thru-hulls and sea cocks. Like us, on our HR54, he has one that is totally inaccessible, sited behind the engine, deep in the bilge. Just how stupid is it to design the seacock to be in a place where you can barely reach the handle? And then only by removing half the galley to gain access!
But while reaching the lever is not easy, reaching down a further 25cm to put in a new thru-hull fitting is quite another level of difficulty. Close to impossible in fact. So Mike called me over to see if I had longer arms than him! Ray is also there helping Mike. Ray has the outside job while Mike is inside. To get to this one particular thru-hull, you have to get yourself into an opening in the bottom of a galley cupboard that is only just as wide as your body! You can only go in arms-first and hope that you can be pulled back out again if you get stuck. I haven’t had such a claustrophobic feeling since crawling down an ex-Vietcong tunnel in Ho Chi Min (Saigon). But that’s another story. One which still raises the hairs on my neck just thinking about it.

In the end, Mike’s arms were just as long as mine, but I had managed to reach slightly further at the forfeit of actually seeing at what I was doing. It was a situation of head (looking) or arms (reaching and doing), but no way to do both. Eventually, with some swearing, we got the thru-hull in and tightened OK. I pray for Mike’s sake that he never has to change that one again.

Back at Cloudy Bay, the epoxy is now dry and we remove all the dry-fitted fittings. Then paint. I seal up the area around the thru-hull outside and inside with Interprotect 2000, an epoxy paint. This seals the fibre glass to stop any long-term water ingress.

By now it’s late afternoon and time to go out and socialize. Pirate Paul’s new(ish) girlfriend, Robyn, is here for the weekend, along with her best friend Katherine. The 5 of us head off for the Ketch-22 restaurant at the Herrington Harbour South Marina, which is about 5 miles away. It’s a pretty busy place and we are reminded that it’s Saturday evening. We had a pleasant evening chatting and joking. And the food was OK-ish, but nothing special. It has to be said that we really do think there is something odd about restaurant food in the USA. It somehow feels like pub food in the UK. Edible and somehow tasty, but a lot of deep fried, artificial flavoring and not particularly healthy. And it always seems to lead to us literally feeling sick during the night. We even didn’t feel like breakfast the following day!

Sunday morning, we manage to get all 5 thru-hull fittings screwed in and sealed into their respective seacocks using 3M 5200. It’s so nice doing a job that you have already done before (we already changed 9 thru-hulls in 2019). With experience you can get so much more methodical about the job.

With the new seacocks in place, it is an easy job to screw and seal the various fittings and connections on top of them and finally clamp the hoses back on.
For the aft bathroom sink and the aft toilet, I reversed the hose pipe so that the end that had been sitting in seawater for the last 12 years now gets the “air” end, and the fresh pipe that had been in the air, now gets submerged. I guess I should have just re-newed these pipes, but this way we get double the life out of them.

With everything completed on the plumbing side, it’s a pleasure to re-construct all the cupboards and shelving that had to be removed to do the job. It’s a bit of a shame to cover up all my handy work, but also very nice to get the interior of the boat all back in one piece again.
On my to-do list, I had allocated 5 days to do this job. But it only took 4 in the end. I’m ahead of schedule! This is no small miracle, in the world of boat maintenance!