Owww. $#!& that hurts!

It is 6am, and I am trying to raise my arms over my head to pull on a t-shirt so I can get back to work. But my arms don’t want to go there, and they are complaining. Loudly. We just got to bed at 2am after the previous day’s work, so I should be good to go.

It is a week and a half into our estimated week-long haulout, and there is no end in sight. In hindsight (it is now ten months later, but my elbows still hurt a bit), my original estimate was a pipe dream. But there was no way to know how long it would take to do things that we had never done before. We also added some work to the list as we came across more things that needed attention.

So here is, long after the fact, a summary of the work we did in the full month we were hauled out, and some pictures to prove it! BTW, we did every bit of the work ourselves, so we have nobody to blame if anything was not done right. That’s the way I prefer it.

The initial plan was to repaint the bottom with copper anti-fouling, replace some thruhulls that were looking shaky, and install a new depth transducer and bronze grounding plates for the long-range radio (SSB). We also wanted to pull both masts so that we could revarnish them. Should be an easy week, right?

Turns out that when I am sanding on the masts, I can’t also be grinding bottom paint, or refurbishing thruhulls, or… Also, to apply ten coats of varnish you need ten days, after everything is sanded. And when there is fresh varnish on the masts, you can’t grind on the bottom paint. These were some of the critical mistakes made in my original estimated timeframe.

The haulout started on a bad note. We were scheduled to have the masts pulled on Thursday, May 13, and the boat hauled early the next day. Before Thursday, we removed all the sails, booms, and extra rigging. All this was lashed down on the deck and various places below. We left the mooring area around 8am for the four hour slog up to Mission Bay. As soon as we cleared the mooring area, the engine temperature alarm went off. I immediately reduced throttle and turned the boat around. On arrival back at our mooring, the engine was once again cool and happy.

This began a half day of troubleshooting the engine overheat problem. It would run forever without a load on it, but as soon as some power was required it would overheat. It turned out to be a mostly plugged cooling passage in the water injection elbow in the exhaust (should have thought of that to start with, right?). We used Muriatic Acid to clean it out and were back on our way by 1pm. After breaking a fan belt outside Pt. Loma and hearing the engine overheat alarm again, we arrived in Mission bay right around 5pm, too late to have the masts pulled. We anchored in Mariners Basin and continued removing things. The next day we motored across to the Driscoll Mission Bay docks, and started our month of fun.

The mast pulling and haulout went smoothly. By mid afternoon Columbine was blocked up in a corner spot, with the masts alongside on rolling carts. We immediately got to work assessing the condition of various parts, sanding out the bottom paint, and stripping the masts of rigging, electrical components, and spreaders.

Without going into the details of each day’s work, which would get tedious to write and even more tedious to read, at this point I will just highlight what we found, and what we did.

Lower Hull:

Columbine’s hull is made of fiberglass, and one of the problems with fiberglass boat hulls is blistering.This is a condition where seawater seeps into the hull layers and creates boils (or blisters) in the outer surface. For newer, thinner hulls this can be a major problem because the hull integrity and strength is compromised. But Columbine’s hull is really thick (which makes us heavy and slow, but strong). So the blisters are more a cosmetic issue.

Still, we wanted to address these, so we used a grinder to grind out each blister, back to the good material. These ground-out spots were then left open for several days to see if they would “weep” moisture from adjacent areas. They were then filled with epoxy mixed with high-density filler, and the areas smoothed back out.

We had known that there were a couple of thruhulls that needed replacing, as well as a couple of seacocks. After removing the known bad ones and seeing their condition, we decided to replace all five thruhulls and all five seacocks.

This just required them to pound a special tool up into the thruhull from the outside, then put a big wrench on it and heave it loose, like removing a big bolt. After the first two, we just borrowed the tool from them and did the rest ourselves. We have since bought our own thruhull tool to keep onboard. And we now also have all new thruhulls and seacocks.

We also had noticed when diving to clean the hull that a couple of the bolt heads holding on the bobstay fitting looked damaged. We decided to remove the fitting and reseal it to the hull, since most of it is below the waterline. What we found was that, of the five bolts holding this fitting on, there was only one bolt that was still whole. The others were all corroded to the point of breaking. In fact, three of them were broken about an inch from the head, and broken again about an inch from the nut. Now, these are big bolts – ½ inch in diameter and six inches long, solid stainless steel. We ended up driving all five out and installing new ones. This required us to remove all the anchor chain and to drill access holes to get to them from the inside.

The Radar unit on Columbine has been upgraded to one that allows many different inputs to be displayed on the same screen, such as charts, depth, wind, etc. We wanted to add the depth sounder to this display, so a new depth transducer was bought. After looking at the installation of the old one, we decided to just add the new one as a second unit rather than replacing the old one. A new hole was drilled into the hull on the starboard side across from the original unit, and new fairing blocks made. One was epoxied to the inside of the hull, the other to the outside so that the depth transducer points straight down. The new system gives us full fish-finding capability, and shows bottom contour and density. A big improvement over just a depth number.

Our new single-sideband radio, which is a long-range radio like a ham radio set, required some grounding plates to be installed under the waterline. These were added to the port side, across from the zinc plate on the starboard. They must have been installed correctly, because we have since been able to transmit from San Diego all the way to Friday Harbor on the radio. This system will allow us to update our blog while at sea, and to send and receive simple emails. It also allows us to communicate with other boats and even shore from great distances.

We also replaced the propeller, nuts, and shaft zinc.

At the end, epoxy primer was applied to all bare areas and three full coats of bottom paint were applied. We ended up putting almost six gallons of paint on. After the boat was picked back up by the Travelift, they let it hang for several hours so that we could paint the areas that the support pads were covering, as well as the very underside of the keel, which had been sitting on wooden blocks.

Upper Hull:

Since we were on stable ground, we decided to put some paint on the upper part of the hull, above the waterline. This part had never been painted since Columbine was “born,” and we wanted to spruce her up and provide better protection. But, there are lots of pieces that bolt through the hull that needed to be removed.

And the bolts, on the inside, are in very difficult places to get to, like inside cabinets, behind walls, etc. We ended up having to empty nearly all the lockers, remove wall boards, and in some cases remove cabinetry to get to all the nuts. In total, there are over 100 bolts holding this stuff on. Each of these had to be driven out with a hammer and punch, and sometimes I could only get a few inches of swing on the hammer due to the adjacent structures. The process of removing the chainplates and rubrail took almost five days, albeit intermittently. There are only so many hours a day that I could swing a sledge hammer. Can you start to see now why it took longer than my original one week estimate?

After removing the chainplates, Cynthia used a large polisher to put a mirror shine back on them. This makes them look better but also reduces future corrosion. We sanded out the rubrails and applied almost a gallon of teak oil to them.

To paint the topsides, we had purchased a HVLP paint spray system. This type of system reduces the amount of overspray and can spray thicker paint. We spent several hours tenting the hull so that our spray wouldn’t land on other boats, and masked off the bits on Columbine that we didn’t want paint on. When I started spraying, though, the finish looked horrible. I tried different thinning techniques, spray patterns, etc. but couldn’t get a finish I was happy with. So we ended up rolling the paint on, which produced a shiny and nice finish. In retrospect I think I could have gotten a good spray finish by priming the hull and then sanding that, like was recommended by the paint manufacturer, but by the time the paint was being applied we just didn’t have time. What we ended up with looks really good, although not as good as a spray job, and has shown to be durable. Good enough. By the way, the paint we used was ProLine two-part polyurethane, known for its high gloss and tough finish.

After the topsides paint was dry, Cynthia painstakingly hand painted the scrollwork and lettering back onto the hull.

Then we had to reinstall all those bolts to reattach the (now shiny) chainplates and rubrail. Good sealant was used between all parts and the hull, along with all new bolts. This ended up being over $300 of stainless steel bolts, nuts, washers, and sealant. But the results are great!

Masts:

This is the part I had been looking forward to most. In the past, I always worked on the varnish with the masts standing and the boat rocking. It was SO much better having the masts horizontal for the sanding. Even so, it was the big belt sander that I think ruined my shoulders and elbows. Both masts were sanded to the bare wood, along with all six spreaders. Epiphanes varnish was applied, precisely following their recommendations. Eight coats of Wood Finish Gloss were applied, the first three being thinned, then followed up with two coats of Clear Varnish for its hard finish and durability. At this point the wood looked really good, but the aluminum fittings on both masts looked a little drab. So I sanded them and sprayed on zinc chromate primer and then gloss white paint. I also repainted the spreader topsides with two-part polyurethane paint. Now the masts look awesome!

The rigging wires and fittings that hold the masts up were over 30 years old, so we decided to replace it all. We bought a spool of ¼ inch stainless rigging wire, some 5/16 inch wire, and a bunch of fittings. The Norseman fittings we used do not require a machine to crimp them, and have been shown to last better than machine swaged fittings. But they are expensive. And they take about a half-hour to install each fitting if you add everything up. We had something like 90 fittings to install, in addition to measuring out all those cable lengths and cutting them. We ended up not installing all of the new cables, but focused on the longer ones that would be more difficult to install with the masts standing.

Some of the electrical wiring in the masts was looking bad, so we pulled new wires through both masts. We also replaced the navigation lights with LED lights to reduce power consumption.

Finale:

Putting the boat back into the water went smoothly, and the preliminary inspection revealed no water leaks. Hooray! We had removed and replaced every component and bolt that went through the hull both above and below the waterline, and nothing leaked! We moved Columbine to a nearby dock for the night, and went back to the yard to finish getting the masts ready to install the next day.

The mast installation the next day didn’t go very smoothly. To start with, it was getting close to quitting time on a Friday for the yard workers. So they were anxious to finish up and get out of there. And we didn’t want to spend another weekend there. In addition we had just spent a full month of very intense work and very little sleep. The first problem occurred when the crane put the mizzen mast (the smaller, rear one) back into place. We couldn’t get the rigging hooked up. It turned out that we had the rigging reversed on the mast – front to rear – and they are different lengths. So the mizzen mast had to be lifted back off the boat and onto the carts to switch them. Grumble grumble from the yard workers.

While Cynthia was switching the mizzen rigging, I rolled the main mast over for them to lift and install. Turns out that it was in the carts upside down, and they had to flip it over so that they could pick it up to install. This process went badly, and part of the rigging and a bit of the varnish was damaged. After we finally got it spun around and picked up, it went into place easily and we hooked it right up. Sometime in this process I cut my hand badly with a razor knife, and was dripping blood everywhere. I wrapped it with some electrical tape and kept going. We really wanted to get out of there! The corrected mizzen was then placed easily and connected, and the yard workers left.

They left us in the lifting dock that night, and we spent the night clearing out of our space in the yard, ferrying all our stuff back to the boat, and trying to get everything stowed. The next day we left and anchored again in Mariners Basin where we finished getting all the rigging reattached and everything else somewhat stowed. After a good night’s sleep we began the slog back down to San Diego. Enroute to San Diego Bay, I told Cynthia that I wanted to have an entire week that we didn’t work on Columbine. I felt we both deserved that. She agreed. It didn’t happen. We’ve worked on Columbine nearly every day since then. Which is probably why my elbows still hurt.

We arrived back on our mooring in San Diego Bay on June 13, exactly one month from when we left for our week-long haulout. But we came back with a vastly better boat, and a ton of additional knowledge about her. We were really tired, but proud of what we had accomplished.