Thu 22 Apr, HHN day 9: Finish cleaning dorade vents, start rebuilding rigging parts and second coat of beautification in engine room.
What happens when you accidentally hit stop instead of snooze on the alarm? You lose 2 hours of your working day. My eyes didn’t open till 8:30! But I must say, I felt very refreshed compared to the previous mornings. Maybe jetlag is finally over, or maybe a 6:30 alarm for retirees just isn’t healthy?

With my late start I have an air of determination to catch up on lost time. It’s damned cold outside today, almost freezing. So no outside jobs, they can wait till next week when it’s forecast to be in the high 20s (centigrade). But with the sun on the tent, it’s reasonably warm on deck. Next week it will be like a sauna in the tent.
So today is the day for deck jobs. In previous days I had removed all the dorade vents and cleaned all the components. Today I do the final cleaning on the vents that are sikaflexed to the deck. They are very dirty and seem to be covered in dead mildew spores. Hence not only cleaning needed but also a spray with Mold Control. We are really hoping that having had an Ozone generator randomly working on the boat since lay-up solved our mildew problem, which we contracted in New England dampness. We want this mold finally beaten.

Next task is to start rebuilding the rigging components now that I have received the parts from Hallberg-Rassy. As usual, I take the easiest first. Finishing off the halyard swivels. The genoa swivel was pretty much done, but the cutter swivel needed to have its 3 buffers replaced. These buffers are simply 1cm pieces of stiff rubber tubing that buffer any torque on the swivel. I had ordered “3” from Selden. But what I received was a length of 3 metres of rubber – about 10 lifetimes supply! So if anyone is looking for Selden Halyard swivel buffers, I can surely supply for several years to come 😊

In my Selden order I had asked for replacement stickers. The ones on the equipment are all scratched or chipped, and look ugly. But they were out of stock for the Halyard swivel stickers. So I remove what’s left of the old ones and wrap them with blue vinyl instead. (I can see a trend coming on here: “if in doubt …. Wrap it!” 😊. So in place of Selden, now we have nice blue stripes on our halyard swivels. Not that anyone will notice them 80ft up the mast!

Next task on the rebuilds is sorting out all the various parts and seals to make certain I have received everything I need. I managed to get all the wiper seals, lip seals and o-rings direct from ERIKs, at a fraction of the price for the same parts from Selden. Only problem was that Eriks normal lip seals have standard steel lip springs. But, they did manage to supply stainless steel springs separately. So I change all the lip seal steel springs to stainless steel. (Hmmm, that sentence is a tongue twister!)

By now it’s early evening and with the sun gone off the tent it is suddenly very chilly on deck. Time for an in-doors job. I spend the rest of the evening sanding then painting the second coat of bilge paint in the engine room. This time leaving the Go-Pro safely out the way! And, this time, with the right colour grey paint. Annoyingly we can never seem to find a light grey paint to match what Hallberg-Rassy used in bilge areas. But I have found, by experiment, that 5 parts white to 1 part grey seems to get the right colour.

Tomorrow, I’m looking forward to rebuilding the hydraulic motors. Can’t wait to see them finished and looking like new again.