A winter project
Now’s a great time to start a refurbishment
Sometimes, on an autumn day too wild to go sailing, you take a notion to clear out the garage. I had an ulterior motive. Writing about my adventures in my trusty roll-deck Graduate dinghy, Lady Blue, reminded me what fun I’d had with her. I hadn’t sailed her since my cancer operations, but I reckoned I was officially better now. It was time to get her out of her eight-year sitting in sheds.
The other reason she’d been sitting idle was because her mast needed work. I’d finally got round to talking to our local boatbuilder about it. The Shetland wind rattling her stays when she sat down at the pier all summer had loosened the screws and rotted the wood around the hounds. I hoped he could perhaps cut out the old wood and plug it with new. ‘Maybe’ he’d said, peering up at a very dusty mast tied up in the roof of the shed. ‘If you can get it out, I’ll see what I can do.’
The reason it was so dusty was because our garage/boatshed had been converted to a stable for our two obstreperous Shetland ponies. Shetlands don’t normally go inside, but our little Fergus was used to wandering into the house if he got bored of being a lawnmower, and being as quickly escorted out again by my husband, Philip, who had views on horses in the house. As Fergus got older he rather enjoyed his stable; he’d spend the evening with his chin resting on the window, keeping an eye on passing dog-walkers and visiting cats, and in the morning we’d be greeted with a ringing whinny to make it clear he was suffering claustrophobia now and needed to be back in his field.
Without the ponies, Lady Blue got her boatshed back. Taking a deep breath, I opened the garage doors wide. It was astounding how much gear had been shoved on both sides of her bow: the lawnmower I was forced to buy in the absence of ponies, Philip’s old gas heater, three keyboard stands, a cage for kittens, a genuine wooden tea-chest, two shovels, Karima’s spring maintenance box, several buckets and two bales of hay.
Once I’d cleared that forwards, I gave the trolley handles an experimental tug.
Lady Blue didn’t budge. I couldn’t have lost that much strength. I had a look at the trolley wheels and discovered the reason: a flat tyre. I could get behind her now, so I decided to keep tidying.
I found all sorts of useful stuff back there. Firewood, just needing sawn up; loads of bookshelf lengths. Several old suits of sails were up on the high shelf, along with a serviceable bow fender and two old horseshoe buoys. There was a carefully covered Seagull motor, possibly still in working order. There was also hay everywhere, so I went back to the house for a brush, rubbish bags and the car keys, for the jack.
I was inspecting the wheel when Philip appeared to see if I was planning on lunch. I pointed out the flat tyre: ‘But I can’t see the valve.’
Philip knelt down to look, acquiring some hay in the process. ‘That’ll be because the person who last took it off put the wheel back wrong side out.’ There was a short silence. ‘That was me,’ he added. ‘I’ll fix it.’
We came out again after lunch, with Philip now boiler-suited up. There was a bit of muttering and spraying of WD40, but eventually he got the wheel off, put back the right way round, and the tyre blown up. We hauled my boat out into the light. Given that she’ll be 60 next year, she didn’t look bad at all; ready to go, in fact, if we could put a dolly wheel on the trolley to make her easier for me to pull around by myself... and if our boatbuilder can fix the mast. I was pleased to see I could still lift it, at least, but It didn’t look good at all in the light.
Still, hope on. Our boatbuilder’s a magician with wood. I have a whole winter to check the hull over, give her a coat of varnish and renew some of the fittings. Maybe next summer Lady Blue’ll be back on the slip, ready for light wind days.
‘There was a carefully covered Seagull motor, possibly in working order’