April – sea fever

It’s the time of year when we recommission Spring Fever, paint the bottom, ready the gear and sails, update the charts and clean and polish the hull. These essential rituals lead up to that perfect moment when we head out from the harbour and the bow first rises to the swell from the sea – a cliché, I know, but it is a spring-time experience always  to savour.

That’s impossible with the boatyard shut and we, the owners – as a slightly-older category of person – banned from leaving home. It’s only when I can’t get on a boat as the summer approaches that I realise quite how much it still means after all these years. Sitting here in Suffolk, 20 miles from the coast, the east wind smells of the sea and, if I’m not careful, I’ll soon be reciting John Masefield.

Planning for the boat’s next cruise is pretty well impossible, with the threat that the epidemic and its aftermath could last for a year. Our Cowes boatyard at Kingston has cut 50% from its storage fees for April and 75% from May onwards, so costs are under control. Thankfully, last year we left Cowes Yacht Haven, which we are told has offered no price concessions despite locking out all its owners and contractors.

At Kingston Rob, the engineer who installed our new Beta engine last year, has just been given permission by the yard to do some repairs for us and for other owners during the lockdown, but with precautions, such as prior notice to the yard of his plans so that no-one else works near him. We have asked him to change three old seacocks and their skin fittings. This has led us into quite a lot of technical reading. Should we go for the super-quality composite materials now available, far better than the plastic seacocks which used to be on offer? It is said that you may never have to replace them again. Should we switch from brass to bronze seacocks and skin fitings, though those are difficult to find?  Or should we stick with the higher grade DZR brass, which has a fair degree of corrosion resistance, and which has lasted us so far?

The latest issue of Yachting Monthly says that current opinion is that DZR brass underwater fittings should be changed every five years, while we last changed a seacock 8 years ago, and the rest have not been changed since we bought the boat in 2009. In the end, price swung it and we are sticking with DZR brass. Composites are so much more expensive that we would not be much out of pocket over 10 years if we replaced the three deep underwater seacocks again in five years time with the same grade brass.  We have five other seacocks, all on or just above the waterline, which are less critical, but three – heads inlet and outlet and engine cooling water intake – are all well under and are critical.

We have also asked Rob to see if he can find the leak in one of our water tanks and repair it, a job we would have done if we had been allowed. Hope it doesn’t need replacing because it is 125 litres and moulded to the shape of the hull. It only leaks on one tack while at sea, and our other tank seems fine. Two other jobs we have commissioned from other specialists are rigging alterations and a gas system inspection, which haven’t been done yet. 

It is now a serious possibility that Spring Fever will have to stay ashore for a whole year. We are still hoping, but not confident at all, that we can launch by September and bring her round to Suffolk for the winter, where it will be easy to maintain her because we will be able to drive straight to the boat with a degree of self isolation, which is a lot more difficult when we have to take a ferry to an island.

Meanwhile, I can sit by our pond sewing canvas and playing at being an old salt retired (or maybe washed up) on the shore. There really is canvas to sew: I bought two large pieces, one to make a new cover for the dinghy and the other a sunshade for the big hatch over the forward cabin. Wish me happy stitching!

This month I subscribed to the Marine Quarterly, a regular collection of longer articles that gets away from the constant diet of maintenance and new products in the yachting magazines. I’ve also made good progress on my commission to update David Fairhall and Mike Peyton’s Pass Your Yachtmaster for Adlard Coles, the nautical publisher, which is now part of Bloomsbury. An hour a day gets a lot done over a month.