Tuesday 2nd Jan 2024 I am back working on the house in Doncaster and was woken a couple of times during the night with the rain and wind. There was not too much problem on the roads in South Yorkshire due to the weather but the M18 was closed by an accident.
The sailing club whatsap has a picture of a rather bad problem tonight – Seems one of the LSC boats has capsised. I don’t know what was going on as there is just a picture with my boat appearing in frame. Cannot really see any detail either of the problem boat or of mine because the shot is from the club house.
Thursday 4th Another band rehearsal for Helen tonight so I need to be away from Doncaster around 12:00. Hopefully the motorways will be operating normally as there are several weather warnings for heavy rain or even snow in the south and east. Those are potentially added to the existing flooding issues on many major roads and rail lines.
Friday Awake at 6:30 to let the dog out so we all got up reasonably early. Very little breeze and a beautiful cloudless day totally unlike most of the last week. Helen has a music lesson today so she stayed at home with Lexie while I went to check on the boat.
Several problems identified and at least partially resolved –
- Nothing obviously wrong with my mooring strops but I shortened the stern one by a few inches.
Sometime in the last week or so the forestay has broken just where the cable comes out of the roller reefing mechanism. Totally my fault because that is the only piece of standing rigging that I didn’t replace. The roller reefing is now removed so I can re-do the cable and the foil is tied to the inner backstay.- The lack of forestay meant that the starboard backstay could loosen itself and the centre part of the bottle screw fell into the cockpit. I have put that together again but not tightened either of them so as not to add any more stress to the inner forestay.
The photo from earlier in the week that included Rathenice turns out to have looked a little strange because the boom was completely free to swing. The shackles that held the mainsheet blocks on both sides had lost their pins (no locking wires and only finger tight). That was quickly resolved and the pins on all shackles wired to prevent then coming undone again.- Water pumped out from the engine compartment as well as some from under the cabin sole. The main battery still reports on the solar controller as >80% charged but I still don’t trust the pumps to self prime so there is a risk of killing the battery if I leave the system live.
The boat with the problem turns out to have capsized on it’s mooring. That was reasonably obvious when viewed from Rathenice.
I was back ashore at about 12 to find a team were about to head out to try to right and recover the capsized boat so I went back out to help where I could.
Basically, just like righting a sailing dinghy, the plan was to tie one or more ropes to either the base of the mast or later on just above the spreaders and pull with one or both of the launches.
After several unsuccessful attempts, and possibly partially due to the slight incoming tide heading to today’s second peak at 1:50, we managed to get the top of the mast out of the mud and the boat swung round parallel to the lagoon wall.
At that stage I suggested we went back to re-try the initial process of lifting the mast from one of the boats – That proved successful as direct pulling on the ‘above the spreaders’ rope lifted the mast enough to get a rope around close to the head. With that I could lift the top out of the water and eventually start her rolling upright.
We then towed her in and moored her alongside the pontoon where she can be cleaned out and repaired. It is good to see the lagoon looking all in order again.
Saturday I was awake at 6:00. Another calm day with clear blue skies although the temperature was 5 degrees at (am rather than 8 degrees yesterday. Helen is on cooking assistant duty today at LSC so we have to be there around 11:00.
Before we set off I managed to get the roller reefing system taken apart and the dinghy port side oar mounting fixed with superglue. Hopefully superglue will be strong enough but I am not confident and I may have to improvise a better solution in the future.
To properly repair the forestay I will need 31 feet of stainless steel wire 4 mm in diameter (According to the documentation it is 877.57 cm finished length between thimble contact points so 9 M material length was ordered tonight and should arrive around Wednesday) and I will also need some better rigging screws as the current one only just fits the bow mounting and has no potential for moving fore and aft or sideways under the loads from sailing.
We managed to arrive at LSC just after 11. The owner of the capsised boat was working on his boat but didn’t need any help so I was at rather a loose end and helped by serving the food. – The team ended up cooking 28 meals which is higher than usual. All good practice for next Saturday when it is Helen and I doing the dinners.
Sunday 7th Set off to Norwich at about 2:45 and arrived exactly 7:00. That was 4 minutes before the predicted time calculated at the start, mainly because of taking the university exit off the ring road and following the windy “wasteland road” to the house. The satnav doesn’t recognise that option in the potential route because of a gap in the mapping.
Wednesday 10th 
Still waiting for a gas engineer to connect the gas hob and for Grace to decide on tiles but otherwise she now has a usable kitchen. I left a couple of minutes after 2 and was home for 6:30, only about 15 minutes later than the satnav prediction. It was a good job I left early though as the traffic news had delays on the M25 and A11 in my direction of travel by the time I was arriving home.
Saturday 13th Today is exactly 1 year since Grace & Helen met Dawn & Karl on the cruise. There is a lot happened since that chance meeting.
I am today’s LSC lunchtime chef and Helen is the assistant. 22 meals cooked and served between 11:30 and 2:00. No un-happy customers and a few complements so i don’t think we did too badly.
Monday Clear blue sky and a frost on the cars as I set off for LSC. Only a gentle breeze from the north once I got out on the water. That was delayed a bit because I had the oar attachment to re-assemble first and then I realised that I left the oars and thwart at home so that meant around an hour’s round trip before I could row out to Rathenice. A nice steady row out did no harm to the glued together oar lock so that repair just might prove to be a permanent one
A little bit of water in two compartments but easily dealt with by the bilge drier pumps once I energised them.
First job was to remove the roller reefing foil from the broken forestay and then create an eye so I can attach the lowering / hoisting mechanism when I bring that out to deal with the mast.
The second job was to form a similar eye at the top of the replacement forestay and then thread the other end down the middle of the foil. I then put the reefing drum back on the foil and finally added and tightened up the ‘stationary’ rollers and eye assembly that locks the drum in position and controls the reefing line.
As I don’t have either the sheer legs or the required multi part block & tackle I tied the foils onto the pulpit and pushpit to avoid losing the whole thing. 
Monday 22nd Matthew has visitors so I am spending this week finishing off Grace’s kitchen. As soon as my phone connected to Grace’s wifi there was a Watsap post from someone at LSC – There is a capsized boat again following the overnight storm conditions. Looks like the same one again. The photo shows all the other boats too so I can see that Rathenice is looking OK or at least not obviously looking as if there is anything wrong.
Friday 26th This morning I received a watsapp message from Karl saying that my boat seems to have lost her bow mooring strop. I went to LSC leaving Helen & Lexie to their original plan.
After the usual 40 minute drive I set up the tender and started to row out to the boat but the other oar mounting broke about at the end of the pontoon jetty. Kayak style paddling from there out to the boat and of course on the way back too.
Rathenice was indeed loose at the bow and flipping around all over as the gentle wind and current changed. There were at least three changes of direction while I was preparing the tender and paddling out.
I think the wear was a combination of the two recent named storms and my attaching the foresail halyard to the roller plate with the shackle pin towards the mooring strop. There had been no visible damage to the chafe protection tube last Saturday when I had done that but now it had worn right through both the tubing and the strop.
I had to join three of my mooring lines together to get enough to paddle out to the proper mooring buoy and tie on. Then back to the boat to pull in to the right alignment. I have used the two lines that already spent time in the water to make a replacement strop and a doubled up backup. 
This should hold while I create a new permanent strop with fresh rope and make a set of backups with the bits of damaged line that I have. I also need to use the thicker reinforced tubing as my chafe protection in future rather than the 2mm wall thickness “water pipe” type tubing that I originally used. Permanent double mooring strops would also be advisable.
The other finding’ from this process was that the cheap shackle that I used had corroded a lot and the pin would no-longer tighten so I used a new one from the pack and will regard them as disposable from now on.
Other problems following the storms included that the backstays had come undone again.
Back onshore and on my way home around 12:30.
Saturday Awake at 7:15 and took the opportunity to mend the oar pivot and set up the mooring strop for a splicing session sometime soon. The idea is to insert a short piece in the same location as the break so the overall result will be a slightly longer strop which is a little larger at the wear point. It should still fit into at least one of my pieces of protective tubing and can act as the backup strop.
Depending whether I get enough time to do the 4 splices required I may be fitting these strops tomorrow after church or even potentially this afternoon if it doesn’t take too long for the shopping trip associated with getting the rope might take. Turns out there is a market today so no parking on the high street and therefore straight back home after the chandlers.
Sunday 28th 
Awake at 5:30 and joined for breakfast by the dog. Making progress with mooring strops as the first new one is just waiting for a thimble to be spliced in ( 2 already included in shorter chafe damaged strops so I need to retrieve and re-use the one from the temporary strop). This one may be fitted after church or later today.
A second ‘backup’ strop is in progress of being made by splicing a short piece of new rope between two damaged halves of most recently failed strop. This one will need some larger tube adding as chafe protection before it goes into use.
In the afternoon I headed to the boat to install the two bow strops. The completely new one turns out to be rather short so the mooring buoy is pulled out of the water. I think I must have paired the buoy end of a stern strop with the deck part of the bow strop when I was deciding on the length. – Hopefully that will be OK for the next 8 or 9 high tides and I can sort it out next Friday.
The most recently ‘fixed’ oar pivot broke again after about 3 or 4 strokes so I ended up using kayak paddling technique to get out and back. Working out to repair and strengthen both of the blocks will be another job for this week.
Another splicing session in the evening and superglue tidy up at the end. That means I can have another try at the oar lock. It looks as if I might not have got enough superglue on it originally so the whole crack was not attached. Maybe it will work better the second time round.