Maintenance 2007
The survey report recommended stripping the old layers of antifouling and replace it with a few new coats. Checking the internet to find out what it involved, the opinions ranged from days of hard labour to a few hours light work.
We now know that the few days hard work guy lived on planet earth, the other still has to check in. My friend Roy Jones offered a helping hand and full optimism we arrived at the hard stand next to Conwy bridge. When we took our tools out and found that we didn't make the slightest impression on the 5 old layers of marine paint, we started to look for alternatives: a first trip to the Chandlery was in place.
For those of you not familiar to the water world, a Chandlery is a place where novice sailors often suffer from their first nervous breakdown. It's a place where even if you quickly pop in for a packet of waterproof chewing gum (Marine approved), you are likely to leave with &35 pounds less in your pocket then you came in with. The first few scratches started to appear in my rosy romantic image of sailing the Welsh coast.
Nevertheless, we came back with paint scraper, one jar of paint/skin stripper (depending where you apply it) and a set of latex gloves, which I should have pulled over my now balding head. The combination of stripper and scraper did the job, but it ain 't a pretty job.
The iron keel was sanded down and treated with Galvafroid, cleverly named protective base paint, suggesting, for those amongst us with some knowledge of the French language, some form of cold galvanising. This was followed by 4 layers of primer on the steel keel, 3 layers of primer on the wooden keel and 2 layers of ...primer on the GRP hull.
After that 2 layers of antifouling followed, which was possibly the easiest of jobs so far. The remaining time was used to sand down and fill some part of the wooden bump protection.
Roy and I stayed several times overnight and the evenings were pleasantly spent in the local pubs where we started to entertain locals with our guitar and harmonica. There appears to be a musical vacuum in Conwy.