Been a few more weeks than I’d planned for between boat work, kids football and school had resumed and other jobs at home crept up.

On my last two trips (August) I finished off the engine bay and resumed fibreglass. The engine space is looking rather good now with a layer of grey polyester over the top.

With time limited to get to the boatyard I’ve started working on a few things at home, last year there was the new tiller and now some new hatch boards made from 11mm plywood.

I’ve managed to test out the new hatch boards (above) and have marked up the little bit needing removing from the top. They fit well, perhaps a little too snug but I am going to try the modifications out again on my next trip.

Since last time the yard has put Rosie’s engine back in (looking good!) But they’ve not quite finished wiring up yet. I’ve resumed the fibreglass work inside and ground out more bad bits as well as started to glass in the next layers of reinforcement.

The nicest, but probably easiest thing to come from the latest trip is the realisation that Barkeepers Friend is amazing!

Rosie Free is kept in fresh water on the Norfolk Broads, no salt corrosion but you do get weed, slimy brown stuff and often a brown tide mark/stain.

It turns out that this stain is limescale! And that the acid on Barkeepers Friend literally makes it dissappear before your eyes!

With only minimal scrubbing (but wearing gloves and eye protection) after about 45 mins 99% of the brown was gone!

Next hull job will be to gently sand the few places where other painted boats have bumped us at the mooring (at least one of those is green) and fill in a handful of gelcoat digs. Once those are cured I will try my hand at polishing with a proper compound.

I say “lockdown” but there are very much more people about now compared to just a couple of weeks ago. But masks, gloves and hand sanitiser are still commonplace and reassuring.

Last time I was busy fixing some minor cracking around the internal bulkheads either side of Rosie’s keels. I’d ground out the bad old matting that had come away since she had been lifted out.

I have progressed well in this area with the help of some west system epoxy, peal ply and some structural foam to fill the considerable gaps revealed by removal of the old matting. Next step will be removal of the peel ply, sanding away more of the paint to get a good grip for the epoxy and a small couple of layers of chopped strand mat in the areas I’ve prepared. Oh and finishing off the preparation of the starboard side joins.

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Since then though, Rosie’s old Volvo Penta MD11C engine has come out for some work, new gearbox and back engine seal as well as refurbished injectors.

While the engine is out of the bay it’s the perfect chance to get to clean up and repaint the engine bay. The part of a Centaur that is extremely hard to get into, especially with the older large Volovo engines.

As I was getting ready to begin my cleanup work the boss of the Yard paid a visit to tell me the engine was about ready to go back in. They would give it a clean up and treat any corrosion. Injectors were back, apparently they were not atomising at all – no wonder we had all those clouds of white smoke!

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Armed with gloves, de-greaser and kitchen roll I had hoped to do a simple before and after photo of the clean up and then paint with the new tin of grey bilge paint sitting ready.

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After making short work of the oily and slightly sea-salty mess I noticed that rather large crack. Cleaning a bit more another not-cracked but bad area further forward.

A bit of a dig in the area nearest me, because it was easiest to get to and perhaps less worrying than the other area yielded the result of some not very good fibreglass work..

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It was basically only held in place by paint, with my bare hands and no tools I was able to peel off the old bit of matting. It was still flexible!

As I’ve been told lots of times before, preparation of the surface is the single-most important factor in making a good fibreglass work. It’s pretty obvious that this was a recent bad job. I suspect this was added as a blockage to stop oily engine-bay water heading forward. But I can’t be sure. I can tell you that when I ground all this out again I encountered a layer of grey paint under this lot.

That said, I don’t think the “work” attempted here was for structural reasons. The outside damage was clearly from the lift out popping the classic osmosis blister, but the poor work could have trapped water here and made things worse but they do roughly line up so perhaps this area could do with a bit more strength.

What about that crack?!

When you are inside the boat, it’s not that easy to visualise where you are on the inside compared to the whole visual from outside. While sitting in here with the lamp on, cleaning all the grease and such away I was wondering if this had been there all this time. The crack is right beneath the middle of the place where the engine sits. Even with the best enthusiasm I’d never have been able to see this spot.

Accepting now this was going to be a much bigger job than just cleaning and painting I wanted to see if there was any evidence outside of a problem.

My initial thoughts were. Oh, maybe this is where the hoist was bearing the weight outside (I thought that was further forward).

Now, a Centaur can stand very stable on her two keels. They weigh between them around 800kg so the little boat wont easily topple forward of back. That said, she was propped up aft in the photo above. I’d have not thought this arrangement a bad idea myself.

Where the wedge is in contact with the hull is exactly where that crack is!

Fortunately, I’d taken the day off work for this. It was a Friday and the yard was humming with work going on. So, in a bit of a daze I rushed off to find the gentleman yard boss who said hello earlier. I showed him the damage inside and he quickly arranged for his lads to prop her up right.

I took the chance to visit the local DIY shop to get myself some sanding discs and wire brushes. On my return she was propped up better supported under both keels

The new aft “support” doesn’t bear any significant weight now. It is only to eliminate any chance of rocking forward or back.

How did this happen?

To get the engine out the yard needed to use a huge engine hoist – apparently it is a pre-1939 feature of the yard! To get it above and move the huge volvo beast out via the companionway Rosie had to be propped up differently. As a result of this re-positioning and the small army of lads required for that job it looks like far too much load had gone onto the aft “support”. Probably if the wedge of wood had been wider and spread the force out over a large area things would have been fine. But it wasn’t.

With the boat now not resting on this spot the crack had closed up, I decided to clean away the paintwork around the damage to get a clearer picture of the repair work needed.

With the paint sanded away and grease removed the depth of the damage was clear the black area is how far the oil from the gearbox removal work had penetrated through (when removing the old gearbox they found the rear seal had failed).

The crack ran all the way through! Going back in the water like this could have meant a leak, perhaps not fast enough to be obvious but I’m guessing enough to sink her after a couple of days!

You could imagine I was quite upset at this stage, but I kept my composure and went to fetch the yard boss again before he went home.

Between us we spoke of the things that needed to be done to fix this. We agreed that I would return for the next day where I’d have his attention for fixing up.

These folks arent’ cowboys, they’ve been running a successful yard as a family for about 100 years. They are masters when it comes to wooden boats of all sizes and have built a great many, including a large number of GRP broads boats. So, I looked on the next day as an opportunity to learn rather than one to get cross at the mistakes. The boss brought over tools that we’d need for the next day and I got ready to head home for dinner.

Day Two

I arrived a little later than planned after making a deatour to get some paint stripper (Do not get Nitromors for GRP work) and then taking it back to the shop after I’d read the “not for GRP” instructions. So, I had to sand the paint away instead.

I quickly set about grinding away the old paint with the loaned angle grinder and my trusty belt sander. The angle grinder was fast for the flat surfaces I could get to but just not nimble enough for the odd shaped cramped places.

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Yes.. that is daylight. Working on the premise that as a guide I needed to grid away the glass areas discoloured by where the oil had seeped in I started as far back as the crack began. You can see from above that I hit gelcoat as soon as the black marks had been sanded out. Gelcoat is not 100% water tight so yes, we’d have taken on water through here!

I’d originally thought this part of the hull to be extra thick and strong. Perhaps the hull material is shown better in this clip from just before I began to grind out the damage:

What struck me (apart from the huge scary crack) was how clear seeing through the fibreglass was. The crack was completely clean and straight. I’m no expert at this, but compared to other parts of the hull that have no paint on this looked different.

It was almost as if there was hardly any glass fibres there. In grinding away the damage I only produced that very fine powder you get from grinding resin away, there was little to none of that fluffy sort of dust I was getting while grinding away old matting elsewhere.

Grinding further forward, to the area where I’d first peeled off that terrible patch of fabric it looks like I uncovered the other side of the burst blister repair.

You can see from above I’m back through to gelcoat in this area too.

This whole area needed to be re-glassed. This was never going to be anything I could do myself, it was a major repair.

I soldiered on with cleaning and grinding. Removed paint away from the whole area where the repair would be needed. Almost on cue, the boss arrived to measure up the fibreglass we’d need.

The day before I had mentioned that I had some West System expoy but that I had nowhere near enough to do this. He right away said “No, don’t use west not here, she’s made o polyester. We’ll use my resin for the job.”

I don’t have any significant experience with fibreglass, I’ve only done a tiny bit of epoxy work and zero polyester based work, but he was certain.

Epoxy vs Polyester

The internet disagreed slightly, but not conclusively. My GRP repair book “The Fibreglass Boat Repair Manual – Allan Vaitses” was also not particularly alarming.

After a lot of googling, re-reading of my book and numerous YouTube videos I think I learned:

• Polyester bonds to polyester. Normally multiple layers of polyester are laid up before the bottom layer cures. The bond in polyester fibreglass is mainly chemical. You have many layers of glass embedded in one thick chemical layer of polyester resin.
• Polyester on top of Epoxy is generally thought to be sub-optimal.
• Epoxy “sticks” chemically and “mechanically” meaning if you have a rough sanded surface that epoxy would bond to it very well.
• Polyester does not “stick” as well on top of existing surfaces as epoxy does. It does stick to existing prepared polyester surfaces, but perhaps only about 80-90% as well as epoxy does.
• Doing multiple layers of epoxy means waiting for each layer to cure (you can’t lay too much because of the heat created)
• You get a bit longer to work with polyester than epoxy before it sets.

So, I’m happy I agreed with the choice of the experienced boat builder of polyester for this work. Epoxy is more rigid and sticks well, but given the cramped area and enclosed space it might have not gone well given the amount of fibreglass we need here.

There we go, a total of 3 overlapping layers of fibreglass the length of the engine bay, with an extra layer down the middle. (so 7 layers at the thickest overlapping part along the length of the boat)

The experience of doing this was a new one for me, I told myself to view this like a mini apprenticeship. Learn by doing!

Boss would whet out the glass in the cockpit on a huge sheet of old ply (looked like from another old boat) and lower it in for me to lay out the 1m length of the bay, doing whole alternate sides each time, overlapping the edge of the mat down the middle by about 3cm.

Over the hour or so we did this I was talked through each step, handed ready whetted sheets of matting and shown how to roll out the air bubbles and get the layers properly pressed in. Working against the clock, with little opportunity to re-position as we went.

As much as I wish Rosie had not suffered the damage here I’m happy with the resulting repair.

I took another photo with the flash off. You can see the two light patches. The bright dot is where I accidentally went through with the sander at the nasty crack. The light patch nearest the camera is where the osmosis blister was from the outside (paint sanded off outside already). If I’d not had to mend the large crack I might not have attended to this spot as well, probably only doing a basic repair from the outside.

Job for the next visit is to inspect the cured result and probably to grind the areas where I’d overlapped with still-painted places (don’t want anything to creep in at that bad interface) – we laid more glass than I anticipated. Then it’s paint the bilges and resume the original jobs.

Phew.

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.

At the end of March I blogged about finishing off the tiller while in lockdown. Since then a few lucky folks have been able to briefly return to the water for quick days out and to make sure their boats are secure.

Rosie Free is safely tucked up inside a workshop so I have had no need to check on her since.

In the meantime I’ve been following the exploits of other Westerly Centaur owners. Reading the accounts of others inspecting keel fixings, fibreglass, engines, gelcoat and many other things.

I’ve been mentally accumulating a bigger and more ambitious list of jobs, where before it was more “do the urgent things” and a cosmetic spruce up to get us sailing again I’ve now decided to embark on some more significant work, accepting that for the near-term I’m unlikely to be able to spend any significant amount of time on the water this year anyway. So, here are my new jobs!

Keels

Rosie Free’s keels were rebedded in 2015 according to my records. There is no cosmetic evidence of corrosion or movement around the bolts themselves but there are some things in and around the keels that I now need to do:

• I plan to remove all of any brittle fibreglass I find in the areas around both keels, fillet and re-glass the existing hull/bulkhead joins inside the lockers
• Also add several new ribs for strength.

The left photo above is from Jonathan Webb’s boat, the right side is the same area of Rosie Free. I will probably have to remove one of the keel bolts in order to add a rib here.

I also need to give some attention to the outside of the keels, there is only light iron rust on both but the black sealant (presumably sika) on the starboard side does not look right. So the plan for this is to sand the keels back to metal, coat them both in fertan and then to paint then antifoul the hull as normal. When lift-in day comes to then give the keels a good wiggle to see if there is any movement, if there is, cancel the lift in, store on a boat stand and fix (and probably cry a bit).

Gearbox and Engine

The gearbox job has always been on the list. The current MSB gearbox does “work” but is very very difficult to get out of reverse. I HOPE that the replacement gearbox I have will do the trick (to my untrained eye it does look less worn inside)

I will ask our boat yard to do the gearbox, I have quite a long drive to get there and it would be a better use of resources for a proper engineer to do the job than for me to learn by mistakes.

Sails and Ropes

This is a job I can do from home! I brought all the sheets and sails home intending to wash the sheets and keep the sails inside a dry house for the winter.

But since the weather is becoming nicer at home maybe now is a good time to unroll the sails in our garden and give them a good proper inspection and try to repair anything if needed. The genoa UV strip probably has another year or two left. The main has an annoying green patch where the stack-pack didn’t fit properly so now is a good chance to clean that off at home. Maybe I can purchase some stick on letters and add the missing “CR” from the sail.

Electrics

Rosie’s electrics all “work” but were not done very recently. With the damage done to the pulpit I also had to disconnect the bow navigation lights. While Rosie is in the workshop I will have access to mains power. Trying to do electrical work using a USB powered soldering iron didn’t go well last year.

So before she goes back in the water I want to tidy up the existing non-engine electrics (engine stuff looks fine so I won’t disturb it) and replace the original Westerly switch/fuse panel with a more modern one.

Hull

On Rosie’s port side there is a very long cosmetic scrape out of the gelcoat, presumably from a careless hire boat visiting Horsey Staithe last year. Thanks to the helpful advice of the WoA on a recent Zoom presentation I am now more confident that I can fix these cosmetic GRP problems given the time. I already have gelcoat filler that quite closely matches the colour of the topsides and will probably invest in a rotary polisher and maybe a dremel to help the pre-fixing cleanup.

In addition to the scrape I have two osmosis blisters to fix on the rudder.

Hull Fittings

Rosie no longer has a sea toilet but does still have the through-hull fittings. We have the traditional two blakes bronze seacocks for the toilet. They are both ceased up shut so I will need to service them both. If there turns out to be significant pinking inside I may consider simply removing them altogether and glassing up the holes.

The cockpit drain seacocks are more of a worry. Out of the water there is clearly a brownish stain leading from them out into the water. They are quite heavy duty but still need to be inspected. I may invest in a cheap USB boroscope for this job.

Deck

Centaurs don’t have a lot of woodwork outside but I do need to give all of it attention. From memory there are no visibly damaged parts to replace so probably just a good sanding and oiling all round.

I do need to touch up the blue non-slip paint though.

Gear

The sheet winches need a service, they work but do feel like they could do with some grease inside.

Probably like most other boat owners you’ve been unable to visit your charges for a while now. We’re no different here but we still have jobs to do!

The main fun job I’ve had has been finishing off our new tiller. Our old one snapped off the day after we moved Rosie to be lifted out at Martham! I think the simple force of the current from astern on the rudder and the tiller being tied up caused it to break. It was very rotten but all hidden within the metalwork at the base so almost invisible to all but thorough inspection.

Before Christmas I purchased a shaped and epoxied but unvarnished tiller from Steve at Teign Tillers via one of the Westerly Facebook groups.

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First coat of international varnish and looking very good! I did four coats in all, rubbing down with 600 grade wet and dry in between each coat.

Finished!

I have now almost totally run out of boat-related jobs at home, the gearbox is done and ready to go to the boat but is sitting in my garage until the distant day I can get to Norfolk again.

My next task is semi-boat related. I plan on doing a tiny amount of trial and error with some epoxy and glass mat in my shed to try and fix one of our dining room chairs. Should take me a couple of days but it’s not like I can go to Homebase and get a new chair.

Stay safe!

At home, almost the only nod to boat season preparation open to me has been tinkering with this new (old) gearbox.

In this mini adventure I partook of the joys of Rust, Fertan and Engine Enamel.

In my previous post I’d given the insides of the new gearbox a thorough look, poked about inside to make myself feel good that the mechanism was running well and would not be worse than our old gears.

I then turned my full attention to the outside, cosmetically it looked kind of nasty, dull red paint and quite a pitted rusty underside that hardly shifted with my mains powered drill and a steel cup brush.

All the loose rust taken off and looking a little better I cleaned up and painted the shift control with some nice green engine paint (not the colour I wanted but it looks good.

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I set aside the project for a few days and left it at the back of our dining room under a box. But within a day or two I had small blooms of rusty droplets on the surface. The cold from our patio doors was accelerating condensation in the mornings and giving us surprising orange blobs on some of the surface that I’d brushed.

I’d heard about this seemingly magic “Fertan” stuff that fellow westerly owners have been treating keel rust with, and after a quick ask on the WoA forums I splashed out on a small bottle for this job.

Fertan is dark brown, kind of like slightly thick soy sauce. When it contacts rust it “converts” it into a more stable surface that by itself is resistant to further rusting for it says six months. You are supposed to wipe it down to take off any black dust and paint with a metal paint after a day when the fertan has finished it’s job. what you see in the photo above is right after application. The job did not take long.

With the fertan all dry, brushed off it was a quick 30 minute paint once the kids were in bed. This engine enamel stuff is quite pungent so I actually left the gearbox outside in the garden to dry overnight (under a waterproof cover) with no ill effects.

More jobs are still TODO but I am growning more confident now, perhaps I could fit the gearbox myself. I should probably do the shaft seal at the same time too.

Since I last posted a whole bunch of things have happened. Rosie is now out of the water in a nice dry workshop at Martham Boats. I totally lost track of when Horsey closes to boats so we were the last to leave our mooring. We puttered along in the beautiful quiet rain on Reverence Sunday and made the short trip to Martham in good time.

Possibly due to unwanted visitors getting on our boat (a few things were missing from the aft locker) the tiller had suffered some damage. There was enough strength left to potter along under engine but sailing would have snapped it easily.

A lucky Facebook recommendation got me a nice replacement hand made by Teign Tillers that I will finish off and fit ready for next season.

I had to leave Rosie tied up alone at Martham for the boatyard to lift out the following day, I really felt bad not being there as there was a few things I’d liked to have done to aid my winter work. Mainly that would have been having a chat with thier engineer and storing the mast somewhere that I could reach the head easily (can’t)

Out of the water she came though and Martham boats trucked her along the lane from the river down to thier workshop. She now sits in very good company with probably 40 wonderful classic woiden broads cruisers and sailing boats. I think there are only 4 other fibreglass boats inside.

So, now time for the jobs list.

• General clean
• Inspect keel braces (tiny crack in fibreglass bonding)
• Permanent fix for pulpit feet
• Replace gearbox
• Tidy electrics

As luck would have it, an eagle eyed WoA member pointed me in the direction of Ebay where I picked up an identical MSB gearbox for £60! I met a charming gentleman former Centaur owner too.

Now I’m slowly gathering the tools and materials I’ll need over the coming months. Today my fibreglass book arrived so I have some winter reading.

It’s that time of year, the end of the sailing season. There has been a break in the rain, we had a dry, windless day so it was time to pack the sails away.

Aims for today were:

• Mainsail off
• Boom off
• Headsail off

Didn’t take long getting the boom off.

Once the jib was down, I got a chance to take a look at the wire halyard that had been up top for years (below).

This looked slightly alarming, the diagrams for rotostay have a pulley at the head of the sail and this doesn’t look like it’s spent the time around a pulley.. (11 below)

With no binoculars to hand I dug out my wildlife spotting scope. Now, this thing is FAR too powerful. I actually had to walk 200m away and sit on a bench before I could focus on the mast head. Where 11 is supposed to take the wire, ours seemed to run through a shackle! When the mast comes down will gladly fix this!

Also, since my last post, it seems the tiller has become de-laminated!

So, we have a few new jobs to add to the list.

• Replace tiller 😦
• Fix headsail top end

More next time when I really decide whether to unstep the mast myself using a home made wood a-frame or leave it to the professionals!