SV Kiviuq

This is Saturday 1st June and Marilou and I leave home for New England on Tuesday, so I felt it was time to reactivate blog posts.

By Tuesday evening we should be in Boston where we overnight before taking the excellent Concorde Coach service up to Portland and then on to Belfast, Maine. Arrival in Belfast should be late afternoon on Wednesday 5th where we are booked into the Yankee Clipper for a couple of nights while we make Kiviuq habitable again.

So this is a busy weekend for us, completing what needs to be done to ready our home and garden for our absence of four months or so. And at this time we are reminded how fortunate we are to have such good neighbours in Geof and Anne to keep an eye on things at home and a great team, Jan, Eric and Ian, to look after the garden. The car will be taken care of by Craig in our absence; Craig being the local mechanic who kept our old Volvo running as well as it did until its recent replacement. So organisation and help there is plenty of.

Of all things, meal planning has taken on an extra dimension this weekend to make the best of the remaining fridge and freezer contents. And my sourdough starter has already been hibernated. Our weekend bread is, unusually therefore, a yeast-leavened sandwich loaf. It doesn't of course have the complexities and subtleties of flavour that our more usual soudoughs have, but it is jolly good for all that.

Kiviuq has also been getting a lot of attention of late as the Front Street Shipyard ready her for our return. This involves refreshing the anti-fouling paint under the waterline, greasing the Maxprop, buffing the zinc nodes and relaunching. And this year prep work has involved stripping and repainting the deck and cockpit with anti-skid. The old anti-skid, International's imaginatively named 'Deckpaint', has lasted since fitting-out, but increasingly large areas of deck paint had lifted or were showing signs of distancing themselves from the underlying alloy deck.

There is absolutely no doubt that aluminium alloy is an excellent choice for a hull and deck material, particularly for a boat that sails the remoter places, especially in temperate and higher latitudes. We know we made the right choice in this regard. All hull materials have their good and bad points. With aluminium alloy the good points are many. The bad point is its aversion to painted coatings. We of course knew this when we made our choice. It is the price paid for the multiple benefits of the material. So renewal of deck paint is just something one has to take on the chin every few years.

Now we look forward to seeing the newly smartened Kiviuq, back in her Belfast berth, in the coming week.

Lastly for now, I know I am not good at taking the time to get photographs for the blog gallery, but I am going to try harder. I have already uploaded the first image of the season! To see, go to the Photo Gallery link in the right column, choose an album and click on images to enlarge.