Sunday, April 05, 2015

At last...

...it's all done. Well, the blacking part, anyway. It all got a bit silly really. One person told us that Kantara would be back on the water on Thursday, another said Friday. Turns out, it would have happened on the Thursday had it not been that the hull painters had overlooked some touching-up which needed to be done where the crane slings had damaged the blacking. As soon as they did that, it meant that we had to spend another 24 hours out of the water, for the paint to dry.

And then there was the mistake with the baseplate painting. Even though I'd told them in advance that the baseplate had previously been coated in Ryflex and therefore had to be done in the same this year, and I reminded the guy who did the painting, they still managed to coat it with Cotex, which means that we'll never be able to have Ryflex applied in future. To compensate to some degree for this cock-up, they waived the several hundreds of pounds of the cost of the baseplate job.

Come Friday morning, it was time for Kantara to go back onto the water. But not before NB Lazy Daze was taken from the painting area to a hard-standing, and a 70-foot working boat was craned from the water into the back of a huge truck, for delivery elsewhere in the country.






Then it was our turn. Lifting the boat this time by means of four synchronised jacks, they drove her by tractor-drawn trailer down to the water to be craned back in.













From there, we drove around the marina to a mooring where Kantara will wait for John to collect her and take her round to his shed for the painting to begin. We packed into the car all of the things that we thought we'd need over the next six weeks, and drove back to St Albans. On Tuesday, we'll return to collect the drawers from the engine room, which we'll paint with the same cream paint as will be used for bits of the cabin, and the carpet, which we'll take in due course to the carpet-fitter, for him to use as templates for the new one.
It's all rather exciting!





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