Endearing oneself…

by John Curnow on 8 Jun 2016 It is that time of the year that the boat has either been out and just gone back in, or about to come out for the annual TLC. They sure do need the love and if you race her hard, she will need lots of things attended to. Not all of them will be below the waterline and not every boat has a full-time Nigel and an owner who gets the yard to do the work.

Around the country, many a club yard is full of racers being slipped and then the owners begin the labour of love. The car shows up, the boot opens, the tools come out and everything from nice jobs like polishing, to crappy ones like removing antifoul, begin in earnest. Just as slips and their railways go the way of the dodo bird, the old days of atmospheric blasting of paint off boats is a yesteryear memory.

The non-ablative paints are awful to remove, clog paper in a nanosecond and can make you wish for pump packs full of that DeFoul stuff. Given that it is as expensive as the antifoul itself, many won’t run to the extra cost. It sure is effective, however, and really easy to pick up off the deck, which is more enviro-friendly than a heap of sanding residue going everywhere (including your eyes, nose, throat, lungs etc).

You can check out all those minor groundings, through-hull fittings, marvel at the way critters find any excuse to set up residency in minute crevices, re-Sikaflex the keel join, check rudder bearings, sail drives, standing rigging may need to go off for X-raying if it is 316, and so on. Joyous stuff.

So what’s the point here? Well apart from thanking the owner for all the good times you have had on board, you also get some team building moments and wax on (the lyrical version in this case) with some of the other crews you have been out to extract blood from out on the water. Always nice to have friends in the fleet, huh!

Now apart from endearing yourself to the owner, which is handy if you want to stay and be part of the bigger plans, whether that’s Hobart, the Asia circuit (which is wicked fun) or deep into the Pacific, there is another handy by-product of your labours.

It is simply that you get to really understand the vessel and why she is the way she is. That can be really handy when you are assessing issues out on the track and quite literally life saving should you be out in the big blue. To know in your mind the way she is built, how she looks, what joins what, where the loads go and so on, especially in the dark, can be a total boon in a crisis.

Remember that it is never just one thing that causes catastrophic failure. Invariably, there is always a string of little things that combine to ramp the disaster up. So then, if you catch it earlier on in the train of events, you could still go on racing, prevent inury, or save your bacon from an elongated chat with Davey Jones. Now that would be considered handy…