Paint... and more progress

With 3 weekends to go, we were hoping to get the paint done before haul out to make life easier. As luck would have it, the weather got sunny, the wind dropped and came from the SW, and the tides were just right.

Portholes taped and ready to go:

Coat #1 done.

Coat #1 (this time in the afternoon sun)

And coat #2 done. To be honest, I was really worried about rolling on the paint again as it turned out very streaky and crap last time. This time however, I started rolling at 07:00 (before the wind piped up and the sun came out), used 10% of the correct thinners and taped a 9" roller to a book hook, allowing me to do paint runs the height of the hull. Voila! A decent finish. It's not glassy smooth like a production yacht, but I'm happy with it.. which is the first time I've been happy with the colour of the boat (after it was white, black, grey, light blue, dark blue, and now this blue).

With the painting done, I was keen to get a hatch installed on the foredeck so we could use the anchor locker to also store our fenders.

With blue water sailing, the less holes in the deck, the better. I fitted the stainless pipe (you can see just in front of the windlass) as the new drop for the chain and will fill in the other one (which you can see at the base of the windlass).

New foredeck configuration.

The dinghy's also been leaking since we shortened it, so I got to work filling the busted / leaking rivets.

Last but not least, the new steering is going to end up going on ebay. I was testing it last weekend and managed to snap the chain as it couldn't overpower the existing internal steering. The idea is to now move the internal heavy duty steering onto the aft deck, and sell all that stuff I bought at the back end of last year and only just finishing installing. Aargh.

So there we have it folks.... 2 weeks 'til haulout and we've effectively done everything we had to do before hauling. I've cleaned the forward cabin and sold off a lot of our spare anti-foul paint, 12V fans, etc etc and also went over to the new marina on Saturday eve to check out the layout.

I had to deal with more morons this week when selling stuff as well - because I wouldn't accept one fellow's offer, he decided to act like a petulant child and I ended up pulling the ads and just leaving it on ebay... Honestly, I just don't get some people.

Anyway, enough of that. Next weekend I'm going to do a few last bits & bobs (lock nuts on the engine controls, fitting a new solar panel controller, tweaking a couple of bits here & there) then it's the final countdown 'til we leave...

10 weeks 'til departure.