Strathspey II

Andrew, who's blog is linked to on the right, is selling his 1969 Scottish trawler Strathspey II, a very nice, part renovated ship, for the amazing price of £27,500. If anyone's interested there is a fascinating history of his conversion on the blog - here.

almost there...

We are so close to finishing stripping the old paint off the roof and repainting it with cuprinol, ready for the final fibreglassing, just ONE panel to go!


Unfortunately, due to too much scraping over the last few days my hand is a similar stae to the gloves i (successfully) used to stop getting blisters from the scraper, and it hurts to grip things, so i'll have to wait a few days before i do the last bit. So close though...

feeling drained...

We have a slight leak in the pipe from our fuel tank (in the deck locker across from the one with the anthracite) down into the engine room and to the engine itself. In order to fix it we need to drain the fuel tank, something i was dreading due to the potential for messy, and potentially catastrophically dangerous, situations involving dozens of litres of diesel cascading out of pipes and into the bilges.

Luckily, whichever wonderful, beautiful person installed the engine and fuel system installed a tap on the pipe, for just this purpose:

and with a bit of scrap tubing attached to channel the fuel down into the jerry cans...

...it was the easiest thing in the world to drain off 80 litres of diesel, which at the very least has taken some of the pressure out of the top tank and lessened the leak.

I've now ordered some more jerry cans,and when they arrive we'll be able to drain off the rest and replace the pipe that is leaking.

Winches and Mead

(Title courtesy of the fabulous Alestorm)

The anchor winch has long been looking a bit sorry for itself, and so that it doesn't actually start rusting away we decided to rust bust and paint it. We got a wire brush attachment for the angle grinder (which is BRILLIANT, it just eats rust and cleans the metal up really quickly) and got to work cleaning off the rust. (i make no apologies for the stylish eyewear, as a photographer the last thing you want is a flying shard of metal in your eye).




Then it was time for the fun bit. Lorna got busy with the hammerite and started painting the various sections. There's a long way to go yet, but it's already looking much better and it's going to look great.

skinning up

After a long wait for the wood to arrive at Homebase after we ordered it, then another long wait for the board cutter to be working, we got the plywood sheeting we wanted and i've now nailed it onto the roof boards of the wheelhouse roof as a nice smooth skin that we can then fibreglass onto. Almost there...

locker up

This was one of those jobs that was going to take 2 minutes and ended up taking a morning.

We recently stocked up on anthracite (coal) for the winter, taking advantage of cheaper summer prices, and bought 25 25kg bags (THAT was fun to lift aboard!).

The best place to store some of these was the deck locker in front of the hatch, which already had a few odds and ends in it, which i thought i'd clear out first, all the better to get more bags in.

Somehow these few scraps of wood turned into a huge pile of junk which covered the deck, including a set of boards which formed the floor of the locker, but which were wobbly and falling apart.

Having cleared out all the junk i wire brushed

and hammerited

one corner of the locker which had got rusty, and repaired the boards for the floor, nailing them together securely and adding a couple of extra bits of wood.

Once these were in...

...i could FINALLY put in the sacks of anthracite which i had wanted to put away in the first place! It had taken a while to get there but it was good to clear out a load more junk and make the locker shipshape. We are trying to do things properly when we do them, as this is gong to be our home for years and years to come, and we want to look after it.

hatches battened

One of the simpler, but very effective, things we've done recently is to buy some clear plastic sheeting and chop it up into rain 'visors' for the skylights. Whether it was through the joints in the wood of the frames or under the eaves of the spine of the roof, water was getting in at the tops of the windows when it rained. Eventually we will be replacing all the skylights with double glazed units, but in the meantime, since we put these pieces of plastic in the problem has been far less pronounced. Hurrah!