And out she goes again...

Hauled out today to do the antifoul and boot-top, expect to be out for about 2 weeks. Had a heart-in-mouth moment when one of the hoist straps broke - put the boat back in the water and went a fitted more straps. We have to get a survey done for insurance, and the surveyor started today. Found a few small soft spots in some of the old planking that was not replaced, but nothing problematic and easily fixed.

James went around today and shaved off all the excess rubber that has squeezed out between the planking layers, and tomorrow we start wet-sanding the antifoul. We have a bit of shaping and filling work to do on the stem wood now the new laminate has swollen and taken its shape, and we will do a bit of filling and fairing in all the little divets in the old wood that were not worth worrying about last time.

Dale Pennington and his team from Touch of Gloss are stripping the waterline and putting on a new boot-top; the budget would not stretch to painting the hull this year but we figured we could at least get some work started. We made a snap decision today to also scrape the topsides back and roll on a coat of single-pot white primer. This will seal the wood where the paint has come right off and protect it until we are ready for the full repaint, plus it should look a lot better than it currently does (at least from a distance!).

We have a full staircase scaffold set up so the kids can safely get up and down - a huge leap forward from the dodgy aluminium ladder we used in Newport Beach!

I had forgotten just how much boat there is under the water....

Aft-most forward strap broken and hanging together by a few threads.