a weather window

finally the weather forecast was for a dry day or at least the rain was to hold off until late evening. The perfect time to paint the topsides. High tide was at 8.15 and we cast off from the mooring and motored up river to the drying posts at the back of the harbour master's office. The usual drama of mooring up but we made it eventually.

Once in place it was just a case of waiting for the tide to drop. We passed time doing a few jobs onboard - repacking grease into the greaser on the stern gland and J went off to buy some hot food.

Once the tide had receded we collected buckets of fresh water from the burn flowing into the estuary, mixed in some sugar soap and started washing down and degreasing the hull. A final wash with more fresh water, a good towelling down, masking off the bootop and we were ready to start painting.

Teamac oil based marine gloss in mid blue. Similar I suppose to the colour she was. Must admit I'm not a great fan of the colour. I had wanted to paint her in off white or even a soft grey as to my mind it's more of a classical look and there is an old photograph of Chuckle resplendent in white. But we had already bought the paint so set to with a small gloss roller followed by tipping off with a brush. It's a fairly easy method and produces a reasonable finish fairly quickly. I say reasonable because really she needs to have all the old layers of paint stripped off and starting from sctrach. That's going to have to wait until Spring when the plan is to have her craned out at Eyemouth for a couple of weeks so that we can crack on instead of trying to do everything piece meal between tides.

I was hoping to get a second coat on just before she refloated but it started to rain even before the first coat was finished. Bloody typical. I did manage to redo the bootop by towelling it dry but it was all frustrating and annoying.

I ended up sitting for 4 hours waiting for the tide to come back so we could motor back to the mooring. As last time tried leaving to eaely and ran aground. Not a big problem as the tide was rising rapidly and we would float off eventually. The RNLI were out and about practising and I wanted to get off before attracting their attention. Gunned the engine in reverse and tried poling the bow off with the boat hook. Suddenly she was afloat and heading back towards the drying posts at full throttle in reverse. J froze so I had to dash to the cockpit and put in forward gear before she crashed into the old  wooden pier. Final indignity was scratching the new paint surface when we were climbing into the dinghy ready to row ashore. A long day!