I made it to the yard! It’s been such a long time since I’ve been able to visit Rosie Free. The number of jobs in my head that I’ve been racking up grew slightly when I remembered a whole load more once I had a look around.

After I’d been driving for about 20 minutes I realised I’d left a few things behind:

• Ladder
• Peel-ply tape
• Wooden sticks for epoxy mixing

The Peel-ply was not really necessary, I was far too optimistic with the level of fibre-glassing I’d get done in one day. The sticks were actually going to be a problem until I found a couple of random leftover lolly sticks in the car while unpacking!

The ladder was the most annoying. But thankfully Rosie is parked next to one of the huge I-beams that hold the roof of the workshop up, so it wasn’t too hard for me to climb that. Not that comfortable though so I had to think a bit more about what I wanted in the boat for the work I was doing, hauling stuff up and down on ropes to minimise the number of i-beam-ladder climbing I had to do.

Once unpacked I went around to give myself more of a hands on “survey” of our hull, thinking primarily to look at the things I was worried about such as the small osmosis blisters on the rudder, the brown (rust?) stains coming out of one of the cockpit drain seacocks, some cosmetic gelocat scratches and dents that need fixing and the starboard keel joins.

• Rudder osmosis
  • smaller than I remembered, does not look like a big challenge
• Rudder “skeg” osmosis
  • again, small patch, should be asy with the grinder and some resin
• Gelcoat digs and scrapes
  • there were lots more than I remember, a few seem to be the result of the lift-out but I can’t be sure it was
  • None are as deep/big as I remembered so I think they are all within my capability to fix
• Seacocks rust?
  • Port is worse than starboard but they both show signs of redness leaking out. Can’t tell if it is the hull fittings easily. Need to check inside and out but I got distracted by other things..
• Keel join
  • Doesn’t look anywhere near as worrying it did in my memory. Only about 10cm of the trailing part of the starboard join looks suspect, the rest is fine. I will repair this as best I can and when lift-in day comes I will give the keels a really good sideways push/pull to see if there is any evidence of movement at all

I got sidetracked while looking at the seacocks..

This is definitely an area that is going to need some work. Lifting up a centaur will routinely involve weight on this part of the hull. She’s probably been lifted up 30 times over the last 40 years this way and should not have a problem here. I will need to sand off the antifowling in this area and have a good look!

I felt disheartened, but still I have jobs that I’d planned to do inside.

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I decided to tackle the port side hull/bulkhead bonding that I’ve wanted to strengthen following noticing thin cracks on both sides. I had originally only noticed cracks around joins above the trailing end of the keels but noticed that there was a crack on the port side at the bow end too.

The mini belt-sander made short work of the glass in the area and sure enough it was like the others, only a thin 2/3 layer of mat over a fairly large gap. I wanted to grind all the weak bonding away and fill any gaps with peanut-butter-epoxy.

Before any epoxy work I did as much grinding as I could. There was quite a large gap here once I’d removed most of the old bonding. This side will get filled with epoxy too. I had begun this side just before leaving but misjudged the amount of filler I’d made up and it was getting a little too hot so only ended up applying half of it. The remaining 2-pumps worth of west system epoxy ended up hot-bubbling away in some water. My lesson for next time is to do more prep so that I can make good use of any remaining epoxy rather than trying to cram too much in one fix.