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Starblazer - 19/01/2015 - A month on the hard



IJust like most sailors back home, Starblazer came out of the water in mid December. There the similarity ends! When the rain stopped the average daytime temperature was in the mid 20s, quite unlike December and January in the UK.

We removed the fuel tank though it was too big to go up through the companionway so we strung it up sideways in the saloon. John set about putting new sealant in the gap between the forward end of the keel and the hull while we were held up in slings then tightened the forwardmost keel bolt when the boat was lowered back onto the keel.

Christmas Day was spent largely in the cockpit, inside the tent, as the saloon was rather a no-go area though we managed to rig up the TV to watch the 2013 Christmas Edition of Downton Abbey! We are rather late converts, having borrowed series 1 and 2 from Brizo in November.

Boxing Day we started work on the hull, removing the anti-fouling we applied in New Caledonia then John started prepping all the damaged patches of Coppercoat while I removed the blue painted stripe just above the nominal waterline in preparation for painting with anti-fouling. We need to raise the waterline because Starblazer is sitting somewhat lower in the water with all the stuff we have put on board plus 180 litres of extra diesel and about 40 litres of petrol. Extra 'stuff' has now been purchased to aid us, a hot air gun, a random orbital sander and a conventional sander plus two 20 metre hoses.

Monday after New Year Lawrence stared work on our skeg. Day one he ground off an awful lot of fibreglass to get to the root of the problem then he started the rebuilding on Tuesday, completing the job finally on Saturday morning. Starblazer is a bit like like a lady of a certain age, not ancient but certainly not in the first flush of youth. Make-up and clothes hide the ravages of time and very few know what skeketons hide in the closet! Removing the antifouling in 2012 we discovered areas of hull which had clearly been repaired, our surveyor said they had been well done. Lawrence discovered layers of Kevlar fibre in the skeg, clearly not as originally laid up by Hallberg Rassy in 1992. I discovered many small holes in the gel coat beneath the paint. Conclusions? Obviously Starblazer has had a close encounter with a rock or reef at some point in her history but she's not telling!

I have learnt how to effect gel coat repairs (how I hate rubbing down!) and the area under the new antifouling is quite sound. Once Lawrence finished we could start the Coppercoat repairs and the weather co-operated. Sunday we applied two coats of epoxy where the Coppercoat was missing, Monday we painted on 4 coats of Coppercoat. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday it stayed dry, Friday we relaunched. Monday,Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I painted; first a wide strip with primer, then I painted the whole strip with white anti-fouling followed on Wednesday morning with a 2cm wide strip at the bottom with a second coat of white. Thursday I managed two coats of blue above the narrow white strip. The anti-fouling paint looks just like the original paint as supplied when Starblazer was new.

We relaunched at noon on Friday to set off back to Opua to get the repairs done to the mast support system.....table out again, fuel tank out again. At least we know how!

Joyce


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