Running repairs

We have arranged to crew for our friends Dave and Carol on board Hocus Pocus for its transatlantic crossing. This involved a flurry of flight booking, a few stunned silences from me and one notable picking myself up off the floor after BA were asking for $6420 for a one way flight from the Caribbean to the UK. However thanks to those ever reliable German Condor air people in partnership with good old Thomas Cook much more reasonable flights were acquired.

I also had a sudden panic about the maintenance we had been avoiding so this prompted a hunt for among other things, long 6.4 mm rivets to repair the broken boom vang. These took a while to locate as in an ideal world I would have wanted them to be 'Monel metal' this a relatively inert metal good for attaching stainless steel items to aluminium masts for example, however these proved difficult if not impossible to locate. In Spain the choice is inox ( stainless ) or aluminium rivets so we went with aluminium.

After careful disassembling and straightening of the bent retaining washers the two retaining bolts were tightened to hold the fitting against the mast track and being careful to make sure all the holes lined up we proceeded to rivet the thing back together.

Someone once said that long distance cruising was just boat maintenance in sunny places, probably true....

We will also make sure we have a supply of these large rivets on board along with our trusty heavy duty riveter.

The short ones fitted in Largs are in the photo below.

If we ever go back to Largs I will cheerfully insert them into the rigger there!

So the good news is Dark Tarn is all fixed. The boom vang is again operational and is happily holding up the boom

Just the decks to paint, the stove to service, the engine to winterise, the tricolour to fix ( again ) it's going to be s busy month!