Pic: Emerald coming up over the rise out of the water

Last week we came out of the water and will be in the yard for a few months. We had to wait for a big spring tide to have enough water to get out of the mud hole we've been in for 15 months. The weather on the morning of lift out was quite mild with no wind but unfortunately the tide was still out. By the time the tide was in it was cold and sleeting but fortunately still no wind, so the boys got on with the job.


Pic: Placing Emerald in the cradle before lift out

We'll stay out of the water for a few months now. We don't want to go back in the mud as it will take off the new antifoul we put on, so we'll stay out until we're ready for the off. We haven't been out of the water for 4 years and other than a few patches of small barnacles and some very black mud (which took some scrubbing to get off and is still stuck on in places), the hull was pretty clean (we used Jotun antifoul which we'll use again) although we don't know if that is due to the scrubbing effect of going up and down in the mud or a very good product. We found a lump missing out of the back of the rudder which wasn't there before, but that could have happened anywhere in the many miles we made around the UK and through the Baltic.


Pic: Colin removing the prop anode and some very black mud

After an interlude where we swapped boat jobs for house jobs on our rental property, Colin has since removed two seacocks and taken the rudder off.

We removed the seacocks as we no longer have deck drains, having replaced them with scuppers we made in the hull instead. We found that when we took a large wave on board, the water would take ages to drain away through the deck drains and would come back up too into the cove lockers at the side of the cockpit, which also had a drain in them.

When the weather warms up the seacock holes can be filled and epoxied up. Two less holes in the bottom of the boat must be good!

The rudder wasn't on our list of jobs but when we investigated it we found a lot of wobble in it and on further inspection found a large piece of fibre glass around the rudder spindle had broken away allowing mud and water to get inside and make voids within the rudder. More on this later with pictures.

It's forecast to get warmer from tomorrow which is good as the cold is limiting what we can get on with at the moment.

Nichola