Charleston Check-list
If you have been following Facebook or Instagram, we spent our winter dock-side doing ALOT of work. This is the reality when we are not in charter mode. Moment now being 37 years old certainly takes a little extra nip and tuck to keep her looking fresher than spry teenage yachts.
For starters, we needed to repair what we broke on our way to Charleston. As we rounded Cape Hatteras, our Genoa furling unit (what rolls the sail up) gave out as well as our boom vang bracket, and we ripped our mainsail. Though we began to troubleshoot the problems early in the winter, it wasn’t until the 11th hour that the fixes / replacements were installed. Working with contractors can be very challenging to convince them that you are a priority and need something done asap. With much back and forth and measuring, and trying to replace individual parts, a rigger that we worked with determined the best / safest option was to replace our entire roller furling unit, as well as our head stay. Let’s just say you don’t want to pay for this replacement on a regular basis!
The other item that broke was our boom vang fitting. This required a custom fabrication to make a fix that would be a good enough solution to withstand the intense forces placed on the boom while sailing day to day, but especially offshore. It took calling the fabricator on a daily basis until it was finally done and he showed up at 8:30 one night to install it.
The first item that we dug into that was more from wear and tear was repainting the helm. This is actually very laborious and time consuming to strip the remaining paint off and use the proper amount of priming and finish coats. Once we finally finished our helm paint, we realized that the cockpit teak was looking a little shabby next to it, so we did some glue replacement, re-bunging, and sanding and cleaning the teak to make it all look more presentable. And in the spirit of refreshing the cockpit, we decided to completely strip down the cockpit table and re-build up the varnish for it.
We had a wide variety of projects large and small that amounted to a lot of work. They included replumbing a leaky fuel fill on our forward tank, repairing flickering cabin lights in the forward section of the boat, rebedding some rust-bleeding deck hardware, repainting the head floors, servicing the winches, resealing the forward 5 hatches, replacing the Air Conditioning pump, replacing the engine start battery, polishing the fuel, changing fuel filters and blowing out all lines.
Out of everything that happened, by far, the largest project this winter was to tackle overseeing a new paint job for the blue topsides, fresh white boot stripes, and starting from scratch on all exterior varnish building up 20 new coats. With 5 months of turn around time, we were sure the job could be completed on time. Unfortunately, this was a rough winter in Charleston with the first snow accumulation sighted in 17 years and very cold days extending into April. With all of the preparations, needing the correct temperature, and having a pokey contractor, we got delayed by 10 days. This doesn’t seem like much in the grand scheme, but it was a lot of effort and anxiety at the end to get off the dock. But we did it and Moment is shiny, functioning and ready for a summer of Provincetown sailing fun!