...and he's out...

Finally..

Yeah - not often I say I'm glad to be out of the water at the end of a season, but I was for this one...

The work party on Saturday I was due to be on got cancelled (somewhat serendipitously, as it meant I got to see England doing the dirty on the All Blacks), heavy weather was forecast, and indeed appeared..  solid 7's and 8's with rain - disgusting weather.. as it was, the club lift out party managed to lift extra boats on the Friday, but there were still 20 or 21 boats on the list for Sunday when I was due to come out..

With the clocks going back, I at least got a little extra time in bed, but the HT was still 10:30'ish so I was down the club for half 7 stroke 8...  and I wasn't the first!

Cup of tea and a natter, and I dragged the tender down to the foreshore (the launch trolley really is at deaths door and needs looking at this winter - one wheel is seized again, but more irritatingly the support struts for the pad the dinghy sits on have rusted away completely on one side) for that last row out to the boat..  to be met by this....

F**king wind!  

..that's it - I give up - I am not buying another windex - I'll make do with a burgee, or bits of wool on the stays, or whatever - I refuse to buy any more of these expensive shoddy plastic pieces of cr*p..  the arrow was there when then mast was taken down - clearly the design can't handle the lateral forces (of wind) we had on the Saturday..

Bolted the engine on the back - the Mariner/loan'er rather than Suzy - and that was playing up..  wouldn't start, then would, rough idling, then cut out, restart, repeat...  finally got it going and with additional rev's and a word to one of the club support boats that I was having problems, dropped the mooring and motored under the bridge to pick up  mooring on the Langstone side and wait my turn..

..not a bad place to sit and wait..

During the storms one of the club boats had broken free of it's mooring and ended up against the bridge on the foreshore on the right in the above picture, but with a 5 and a bit metre tide, two of the lift team got a rope on her from one of our big carriers, plenty of throttle, and off she popped - her mast is down but she really has had a very lucky escape - just scrapes on the rubbing strake down one side..

The boats were going ashore in a steady stream, but as a tiddler with less than a metre draft Sparrow was clearly well down the list, and sure enough on hour or so after HT one of the lift leaders asked me to put her ashore on the shingle next to the slipway where she could be recovered at leisure later..  once again the engine was giving grief, but after multiple starts, finally started and kept going...

Either way, job done, safely on the shingle, though it isn't ever going to be something easy to do when it is so counter intuitive! 

Ready for picking up later..

While I waitied for the tide to disapear, and me be lifted, I cadged a lift for me and a bucket of tools back to my tender which had been left on the mooring...  time to recover the mooring gear, and somewhat amazingly, as per last year, the shackle again came undone! Waterproof grease on the thread clearly the way forward, but after two years it had had it's day anyway - new one for next season..

Back to shore - tender away for the winter stored upside down - put the mooring gear away and then nothing to do until Sparrow got lifted..  which finally happened about 2 or 3 hours later - think I was the last but one boat. Getting on for evening, swift rinse of the outboard - same issue again with starting, until it had warmed up when it ran fine (I'm thinking spark plug.........) - tidy up on the boat - removed the boarding ladder and did my first repair of the winter on that (sheared bolt on one of the support legs) - chocked up the boat, and home for a long shower...  knackered...

I'm down again on Thursday for a trial fit of Suzy, and a pressure wash of the hull..