“A lot of people were very glad to see the end of 2020 but the following two years havent really been that much better. For me this year has been a mixture of making progress on some of the smaller bits of the restoration interspersed with periods of other stuff that often feels like it is getting in the way of progress. There will definitely be time for launching and sailing during 2023 because there is a master plan to retire from the NHS fairly early in the year (as well as another plan to increase the number of rental properties). Just a few more tasks to complete first – Join a club, move the boat, test engine(s), finish fore hatch and launch (Not to mention non-essential jobs including making spray dodgers and a new cockpit cover, full re-coat of the anti-skid treatment, boat names, replacing upholstery, a lid for the ice box and cabin curtains. Almost all of the list I made at the start of October.)
Alongside that I am still on a mission to find and fix all or most of the remaining leaks that let rain water into the cabin and the engine compartment but there is not much progress on that. – Recently the weather has been wet enough for that but usually by the time I get to the boat it is dark and too cold to encourage much hanging about waiting for the drips to start.”
That was as far as I got writing the blog entry on 19th December 2022 and all of a sudden it is June 2023 so once again the rest of this is a catch-up based on my diary entries. This year the usual Christmas things took a somewhat different twist as we had two Christmas celebrations – The first one was on the “UK” date which included both Ukrainian families at our house for turkey and all the trimmings plus Svetlana’s mini deserts. It is certainly interesting trying to fit 14 around a table in a 3 bed semi ! Then we had a repeat “Ukrainian Christmas” meal on St Nicholas day at Svetlana’s house but this time just for 8 people.
With all of that going on the only boat work getting done was making a set of curtains. These started life as a red tablecloth from IKEA as that matches the colour of the hull. There’s not really a lot to learn from curtain making apart from the added interest of having a profound taper from a “drop” of cm at the aft end to cm at the forward end to match the tapering window. 