Thursday 1 November: Herrington Harbor North, yard day #15 – Ceramic Pro installation completed, back in the water, rig inspection, clean decks, cutter up, and tidy up.
Early start, it’s going to an exciting day. We get back in the water, and we have lots to do before we get launched.

Karen and Nancy (Red Sky) have an early start too, as transom needs finishing with Ceramic Pro before we get in the slings at 11am. Swim platform gets the Bravo coats, finishing touches on the top side, masking tape off, and job is finished right on time. We do have a brief moment of just walking around the boat and comment how nice it all looks now. And we ask Liz (Free State Yachts) to come and see the result, maybe other Hallberg Rassy owners will be interested in having this Ceramic Pro product installed on their gel coat. And she seems pretty impressed too. We cannot wait to wash the decks of the white dust, to see the result in full splendor.

Glen is on a hectic schedule, with few small jobs. Exhausts extensions and steering wheel go back on, new blocks of wood cut for the fridge gas coolant bottle. Then Ray comes over with the fork lift to help us lift the dinghy into the davits. Thank you Ray 🙂

Pottering, pottering, and before we know it the travel lift comes to get us! It feels like such an important moment. Glen flies the drone over the travel lift as Cloudy Bay is driven around and gets launched. Pity she has such an ugly paint on the bottom. But the shiny ceramic coating is taking our eyes away from this flaw.
The launch is a quick and smooth process. The team here is very professional, probably the most efficient we have met yet. Only few minutes from getting in the slings to splash in the water. Same as at the haul out, Cloudy Bay is manually handled out of the slip, and then we motor few meters to the dock. Made us feel like little chicks being waved off by their mother hen. Few minutes later we are tied to pontoon M, where we left from 15 days ago, where the yard kindly allowed us to remain docked till our departure this weekend. Such a relief to be docked, and just step off the boat rather than climbing the step ladder 100 times a day! (Thanks Ray for loaning us your ladder).

It’s sunny and warm now, so Glen strips off and starts the most important task: wash the decks, all the dust from the compounding and bird poop need to come off! We’ve been looking forward to this cleaning for a while now. Quite a workout and it takes him a fair bit of time, but at the end he has a big smile on his face. It all looks clean, tidy, we can see through the windows and we can sit in the cockpit! On that note, of “let’s enjoy our clean and shiny boat”, we have lunch in the cockpit, after 2 weeks of eating inside.

A team from East Coast Marine Rigging arrives for rig inspection. Up on only one halyard, that is brave. I always winch Glen on two halyards. They are very knowledgeable, and point out few issues we need to keep an eye on. Two shrouds show signs of rust, the mainsail furler sounds a bit tired and ideally should be sent to Selden in Sweden for servicing. Otherwise all good. We will receive the full written report tomorrow.

We switch on the bilge pump, and to our surprise it pumps out quite a bit of water. Normally, we have it on all the time on automatic mode. But while on hard we had all the systems switched off. It will be interesting to see if water level in the bilge rises again later in the day. In the evening we check again and it’s all good. We do not have an explanation how the bilge got so much water earlier. It will need some close monitoring in the coming days.

Then is putting back the fittings we took off from around the cockpit – clamps for bimini and tent bars. Looks like it will rain any moment, and we need to be fast. Cockpit tent will remain up till we get to Antigua, as during the night sailing is quite cozy inside, protected from the wind.

I winch Glen up the mast to install the new windex and to remove the tie-raps. What a waste of tie-raps, the birds were not put off in the slightest! We hope Cloudy Bay’s mast will be less tempting for birds here in the marina, as there are so many other boats to choose from! The windex goes on quickly, and I had the task to confirm if the tacking marks are perfectly even either side. Which I thought it did. When Glen got down, he said the windex is a bit to the starboard side. Well, at least I took pictures to prove what I saw!

Right after sunset the wind calms down briefly, and we hoist the cutter. That was the easy one. Genoa-monster will be tricky, tomorrow. Today we only set up the sheets for it.

Then it’s yet more pottering on the deck: tidy up aft lockers, and make room for the large pieces of wood that are now added to Cloudy Bay’s inventory. Quite often Glen is in need for wood for various projects, and Ray was very kind to help providing such from their scrap corner.

We are running very low on water. We’ve been on half a tank (250l) when we pickled the water maker almost 4 weeks ago. And we plan to leave it pickled till after we finish with the yard time in Antigua. As a consequence, we now need to fill our tanks with tap water. Not happy at all about this compromise, as I am quite keen to keep our tanks clean of any deposits from the tap water. Maybe we clean water tanks right before we switch on the watermaker (last we cleaned them 3 years ago, and it was a painful job).

Another evening of tidying up. This time the tools and tool boxes actually make it back to their lockers. Gradually we are getting ready for sailing again.
We go to bed to the sound of wind in the rigging. And nice to feel the boat sway to the wind. Lovely to be back in the water!