I made a complete hash of moving her around from her berth to the slip for the lift out. 0800 Monday morning, and a shower had just passed through. Wind was gusting to around 18 knots from the north west, so over the city and onto our port bow as we cast off, which I thought it would make things relatively easy.
I released the mid-ships spring, and Dad slipped the line on the bow. Which then promptly snarled up on the dock cleat before it came clear. I nosed back in, but couldn't get the mid-ships spring back onto its own cleat, so we ended up resting lightly against our neighbour whilst Dad sorted out the tangle and released us.
No big thing, no damage done.
Lines finally clear, I gently eased her back into astern, nudged clear of our neighbour and out of our slip. I'd meant to do my usual turn to port and then reverse down the aisle into clear water, but an unfortunate gust caught me, dampening the turn. I'm not exactly clear on the sequence of events that followed, but I somehow ended up turned 180° but across the aisle, and now fighting against our natural prop walk to try and get her to turn to where I wanted.
What followed were a series of shuffles forward and astern as I tried to get either the bow or the stern to turn into the wind, and we crabbed slowly but inevitably the wrong way down the aisle.
Whilst I'm not seeking to make excuses, the aisle is about 15 meters wide, which is a little problematic when your boat takes up 11 of those meters.
It all turned out okay. At one point somebody from the crew of another boat on the pontoon opposite ran over to stand by ready to fend us off the boats on his side, but short of a catastrophic mistake on my part, I was never really in any danger of shunting another boat, only running out of room as we crabbed our way in the wrong direction eastwards down the aisle before I could get her turned.
But we didn't, and eventually, disregarding the adverse prop walk and just focusing on turning ahead, taking the way off astern, turning ahead again, and so on, I eventually got her lined up to proceed sedately down the aisle to open water, leaving bow first for the first time in our short tenure so far at QAB.
I waved my thanks to the crew of the other boat as we passed. They grinned and waved back.
I reversed up to the pontoon off the slip where we were scheduled to meet the lift to save manoeuvring in close proximity to the shallows off the university's marine station, as the yard had told me they wanted to take Petrella onto the lift stern-first. The final landing wasn't a particularly elegant piece of boat handling either, but by this point I'd given up on elegance. As soon as we were within reach of the pontoon, I took the stern line and hopped off to secure it. Dad secured the bow.
Everything else went without a hitch.
Despite not having been out of the water for about eighteen months, she's still quite tidy underneath, the coppercoat antifoul still performing well.
We replaced the anodes easily, the anode on the prop-shaft having disintegrated completely, and the one bolted to the hull clearly having given good service. The stainless steel nylocs on the latter made swapping it for a new one very simple.
The headsail had to come down for the duration she's on the hard, so I handed that over to the local sail makers on site to launder for us. If nothing else, it was easier than trying to neatly fold the huge thing for storage by myself. Dad's always willing, but relatively immobile at the moment as he's suffering with his knee. I also removed the bimini from its frame and gave it to them to repair a few seams that have come unstitched.
Next weekend we'll rub over the coppercoat, which seems to be all it needs at this point, and renew the antifoul on the keel and few odd patches on the hull where the coppercoat has had to be removed for previous work, and a company called Choppy Seas is going to clean and polish the hull for me above the waterline, to see if they can't clean up some of the staining and yellowing.
With all that hopefully done, she's due to go back in on Monday 24th. Hopefully I'll make a more elegant job of putting her back in her berth than I did getting her out of it.
July is a crazy month for the band, with seven gigs booked, but I do have the first weekend free so will hopefully manage a trip out to somewhere and back. If workloads with the day job permit, I might sneak a Monday or two off across the month, again to sneak out for a bit of sailing. If we don't have Nikki along with us, I quite fancy just anchoring out somewhere overnight, weather permitting, rather than simply trekking the miles harbour to harbour in Fowey and back as usual.
Then come August, the band goes quiet and Nikki and I have a couple of weeks off work at the end of the month. I'd like to make it around the Lizard to Penzance, but would be happy settling for Falmouth. Of course, we could go the other direction, and head back to Brixham and Torbay.
But I do love Cornwall.
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