Salt and vinegar, Sir?
Fed up with finding the zips on your nice oilskin jacket seized up with salt? Here’s a tip I picked up from the guys at Sleipner Side Power who made my bow thruster. The zinc anode had become stuck and I was warned against heating it for fear of collateral damage. Instead, I was told to free it with vinegar, which works wonders with caked-up salt.
It’ll do for zips as well, they said. And it does. The only thing is, you do smell like a chip shop for a while, but, as better men than me have observed, you can’t have everything in this life. If you’re looking straight at the bows of a boat, the turn of the bilge is the place on each side where her curves are most convex. When a single-keel yacht dries out without support, she generally lies on the turn of the bilge, which should be beefed up in the build process just in case. Working craft expecting to dry out each tide, such as Morecambe Bay Prawners, had an extra-heavy protective plank at the turn of the bilge. A firm turn confers sail-carrying power.