We arrived back in the UK on the 9th June and Vagrant was lifted out at Mayflower Marina, Plymouth two days later.
For safety, the yard insists on foresails being removed to reduce the windage. This was an unexpected struggle. One of the grub screws in the genoa foil had backed-out, causing the top bearing to stick when we were pulling down the sail. I had to go aloft to give it some gentle encouragement. This has happened before and I've spent sometime replacing the screws with the appropriate thread locker. This was one of the few screws I hadn't previously attended to.
I was left home-alone for a week while Sara took her mother on holiday. Our plan was to get the transmission sorted by a marine engineering company and be back in the water the week after. We were also taking the opportunity to paint the bottom, but I spent a weekend in the hoist blasting the old anti-fouling away with a powerful pressure washer and soon discovered it was going to be a much bigger job. There was far too much flaking, and the paint would need to be taken back to the barrier coat and re-primed. I was panicking a bit about getting it done in time, but amazingly Dominic, part-time vagrant, came down to help me.
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| Flaky paint - all has to come off |
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| The pressure washer did some of the work |
Sorting out our transmission problems took far longer than expected and the rest of June was spent on the hard. The job itself was straightforward, but we suffered delays beyond our control waiting for parts and an over-booked engineer. However, that gave us lots of time to do a good job on the anti-fouling and for both of us to work on other boat jobs. Tasks of note include fixing a dent in the centreboard due by a Norwegian rock, repainting a section of the toe rail and fixing the paint around our swim ladder, servicing four winches, cleaning the engine bay, polishing all the stainless, and replacing the watermaker seacock with a more reliable TruDesign model. I even found time to wash our fenders.
The centreboard is filled with sand. The dent had introduced a tiny leak, so we had to wait for a few days while the water drained out (Boréal warned us not to drill it, or we'd end up with a sandpit), then we fixed it with epoxy, faired, and painted it.
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| The dent in the centre-board |
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| Repair in progress |
The toe rail paint repair is an ongoing project, but is much easier to address in good weather.
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| Never attempt anything without the gloves |
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| New PSS seal, new coupling, all nicely aligned |
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| Propeller greased and anodes replaced |
Finally we were afloat. We spent a week in Cawsand bay, waiting for good wind to take us west. Here we hung out with Barry 'Old Seadog' Perrins of YouTube fame who we had met in the boatyard and met Fred and France, owners of the Boréal 47 Type Eau arriving from the Azores. I've interacted with Fred many times on the Boreal owners group. It was Fred who recommended changing the seacock. Coincidentally, they needed similar transmission work done and were headed to Mayflower on our recommendation.
When the wind arrived, we had good Easterlies. We stopped at Polkerris, just west of Fowey, then sailed overnight to the Isles of Scilly. We spent a long weekend there, and by chance met up with a flotilla of our Penarth Pirate friends on a summer cruise.
The weather continued to be fine, and we could have spent weeks in the islands had we not wanted to round Ireland. The winds had backed to the North East, so we headed off for Kinsale, the furthest west we had made it along the Irish coast in 2022. From there, we have been slowly hopping from anchorage to anchorage. The south-west corner is as lovely as its reputation, and we're looking forward to working north.
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