For those of you who were wondering if I had sailed to the edge of the world and fallen off ...
The number one priority was to haul out and fix the leaks as soon as possible, so Bundaberg it was. Also there are a few good newfound friends here with good contacts for the job.
Being slipped here is nothing like Melbourne.
For starters, you remain aboard whilst being lifted sky-high in the travelift slings; rather a shaky experience.
Secondly, you don't get handed the high pressure water blaster to do your own washdown; it's an extra $108.80 for a 32' boat. You can't do a wet and dry sand in the slings so must dry sand later.
It's another $100 to set up the cradle. There are additional environmental levies, despite the lack of too many rules or OH&S regulations.
There's no safety induction process; no fleuro orange "Visy" vest to wear or enclosed footwear necessary; thongs are just fine.
You can live aboard, do your own work and make as much mess and noise as you want. In fact, the daily jack-hammering, grinding or sandblasting of nearby steel fishing boats is quite brain juddering. Ear muffs are the latest fashion accessory. It's been a week so far and looks like being at least one more.
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| The view from my back door. |
A pleasant luxury is the airline style stairs available for hire at $50 pw, rather than having to climb up and down a sheer vertical ladder a hundred times a day. Makes going to the loo in the middle of the night less challenging.
But that's the easy part.
The task of trying to locate the source of the leak has been a far greater challenge, involving many great minds, much exploratory grinding in confined spaces, great muscle power and ultimately, throwing a few bucketloads of money at it.
It was soon obvious that the rudder needed to be removed, a simple enough sounding job, rather like one of those "just do that ......" type injunctions, where the word "just" implies no more than ten minutes of sweat.
The rudder is hung on the back of a triangular shape of fibreglass, called a "skeg". At the bottom of the skeg is a bronze shoe, or "pintel", which has a bearing which encircles the rudder post (albeit with a rather misshapen and sloppy grip).
Before the rudder can be dropped the pintel has to be removed. Theoretically by just undoing a couple of bolts, only it's not that simple. It's not just bolted, but glued on with fibreglass resin.
After a great many thumpings, bashings, hammerings, prisings, cussings, willing helper, Mark, goes off to just borrow a crow bar to forcibly encourage the parting of the ways, ushered in with a great shquwking/tearing/breaking sound as the resin reluctantly lets go.
The local shipwright, Colin, declares this to be a bodgy 5 pm Friday afternoon shortcut that should never have been put together in such a way and was basically an accident waiting to happen. It's nothing to do with the leak, but it's potentially a show-stopper that needed to be fixed. Always good to find out these things in advance before losing a rudder mid-ocean.
The fix for this is to just grind back a section of the skeg, just make up a plug out of solid fibreglass (not just resin) with a protruding tongue to attach the pintel to and just fibreglass it all back together.
Back to the leak ....
Once the rudder was off, the stainless steel tube that the rudder stock went through could be cut in half and removed. Then the surrounding area inside the boat ground back.
The hole in the centre is where the stainless steel pipe was. The other hole is where the cockpit drain through-hull fitting goes (also leaking).
It soon became apparent that the fibreglass had never bonded properly to the stainless steel and was allowing small amounts of water to leak in.
A preferable material for the new tube is fibreglass. The tube has bearings top and bottom (new ones will need to be made) which hold the rudder stock snugly in place.
It's great to have made all these discoveries and to be getting them fixed now. Just as well I've been living off lettuce and lentils for the past few months' cruising. :-)
While out of the water, it's always a good idea to just paint the bottom with fresh antifoul, so that's next.
Shanti will stay here in Bundaberg while I fly back down to Melbourne for a month over the Christmas/ NY period, then over to NZ for my father's 99th birthday.
Looking forward to catching up with old friends again soon.
