Hard Labour.

Three weeks ago we used some wire wool to get the worst of the corrosion off of the samson post at the front of the boat. It seemed to work, so all well and good.

The trouble is that wire wool is made of iron and after a couple of weeks of salty sea air, all the tiny little flecks of wire that I'd washed over the side when we cleaned up, are now tiny little flecks of rust, bleeding all down the side of the boat.

So, this weekend was one of hard labour. We went down to the boat on Saturday afternoon and I spent a couple of hours working up a sweat t-cutting and polishing the cockpit. Missy and Clemmie spent an equally industrious couple of hours dozing on the top of the coachroof in the sunshine. The poor things were exhausted at the end of it.

Katharine Henry ACMA. came down to see us on Saturday evening, carrying a welcome bottle of pink fizz to celebrate the addition of those last four letters after her name. (She's now officially a Chartered Management Accountant), so I was allowed to stop working my fingers down to stubs to share in the celebration, Yay.

The wind and tides were all wrong this weekend to do anything very interesting (low tide mid-afternoon, brisk winds on Saturday), but we had a pleasant little sail around the harbour on Sunday morning to work up an appetite for lunch, we got the sails up on the way to Itchenor and headed in a stately starboard tack fashion through the massed ranks of racing dinghys, enjoying the experience of actually having some of them being the give way boat occasionally.

We sailed down just past East Head and were going to try and sail back, but with the wind wandering through 180 degrees at times and the tide ebbing pretty quickly, we motored back up to the marina. Not very exciting, but at least the sun shone and Katharine got to see more than Pontoon F.


Then it was back to more hard labour for me to try and get those rust marks out of Moonshine's sides. So the dinghy got inflated and I spent the next couple of hours bobbing around with a pan scourer and t-cut. (Actually Liquid Rubbing, especially made for boats and therefore three times the price). I got most of the marks off eventually, but that's the last time that wire wool gets used on Moonshine!