Building an Anchor Locker

Ready to start cutting.

Not having an anchor locker on Moonshine has always annoyed me. The options were feeding the chain into the hawse hole link by link, or else keeping the anchor and chain in a bucket in the stern locker. I wasn't happy with either, so now I'm taking the chance to give Moonshine a proper bow locker. I started by carefully measuring the anchor and then got the grinder out.

At this stage there was a brief moment of "oh no, what have I done!".

I made the wall and floor of the locker from 12mm plywood, encased in several layers of glass fibre. 

To make the locker lid, I took the section of deck that I had cut out and used bits of wood to hold it in position. I put black plastic on the deck to make sure the fiberglass wouldn't stick to it, and then laid up a thick flange around the outside of the lid.

After popping the lid off the deck, here's what I was left with. A locker lid with a ragged fiberglass lid around it.

A bit of grinding later, and we're left with a pretty passable anchor locker hatch.

Add a bit of paint, some hinges and a latch and it'll be ready for action.

The Real Work Starts Again

Now that the lockdown is loosening a little, I've finally been able to get back to work on Moonshine. And there really is a tonne of work to do!

This is one of the more serious issues on the boat. All of the chain plates (the fittings that the wires supporting the mast connect to) are full of water, the wood is rotten and one of the bolts broke off in my hand. One of my priorities is to get these fixed, and do it in a way that makes them far stronger than they were before. I've got something unusual planned, stay tuned...

After stripping out the interior of the boat, this is what I was left with. The hull-deck joint was held together with self tapping screws, filler and prayers; and was broken in three places. I used polyester filler to create a small radius on the inside of the joint and then laminated over it with 1800g of woven glass fibre.

After glassing the hull-deck joint I started reinforcing everything. I've added ribs every couple of feet to support the joint and stiffen the hull. I've also added cross beams to support the deck under the mast base and under the tack point for the storm jib.

All of this is horribly dusty work!! I can't wait until I can move on to working on the outside of the boat!

I got distracted...

When I was around fifteen or sixteen, I was massively into board surfing. I was making my own boards, and even managed to sell a few to make a bit of pocket money. At one stage I shaped a board, but then I think I ran out of glassing materials and got distracted by school and kayaking and whatever else was going on at the time. Whatever the reason was, the shaped foam blank got wrapped up in plastic, stored in my parent's attic and completely forgotten about for the intervening ten years or so. I haven't even thought about making another board since then, I blame kayaking for becoming all-consuming for a long time...

As of last week though, I had endless amounts of free time and a whole pile of glassing materials just waiting for the day I can restart work on Moonshine. It looks like my old blank is going to get it's day in the sunshine after all! The board is a 6'1 x 21'' x 2 3/4'' fish. The template is retro but the rocker, fins and bottom contours are more modern. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, even if I wasn't expecting the red and black resin swirl on the bottom to end up looking this brown! There are some spots where the resin bled under the tape on the laps but I decided to call it character instead of hiding it with a pin line.

Not too bad, eh?! I REALLY can't wait to get out on the water and find out how she goes!! 

COVID Made Me Do It

I am aware that this is like sticking a big exhaust on a 1990s Nissan Micra and expecting it to look cool...

Genoa, complete with bright green crescent moon, Some might say it looks suspiciously like the moon on the Turkish flag but I promise the proportions are different!

Mainsail, complete with a visibility patch so bright that my phone camera couldn't handle it! "I didn't see you" is definitely not going to be a valid excuse for a collision with Moonshine! Especially not when you see what I plan to do to the rest of the boat...

Storm jibs are meant to be bright, right?! This one started life white, which was never going to do. My plan is to run this as a staysail on a removable baby stay. It should add a little bit of power when reaching in light airs, reduce weather helm slightly, and look positively vomit inducing in between Moonshine's other black and green sails. 

I know it won't be to everyone's taste, but all the fast boats have black sails, and white is so boring. And I had a hell of a lot of time on my hands! I'm actually quite a big fan of how it's turned out. The photos don't nearly do the results justice, those colours are BRIGHT!!

The paints and processes used for painting the sails of high end racing boats seems to be one of the internet's best kept secrets. I did some research and didn't find anything particularly useful. So I've used ordinary artists acrylic paints thinned to a more useful consistency with water. We'll see how they hold up, fingers crossed it doesn't just turn into a layer of black dust all over the decks mid way through the first tack...

Windvane Update

So, just a quick post on the last couple of weeks of work. Since finishing the rudder modifications I've moved on to building a wind vane autopilot, which (if I can get it working well!) will be an absolute game changer for solo sailing on Moonshine. I have experimented with all sorts of sheet to tiller steering arrangements in the past and never had much success, so up until now my voyage length has been limited to how long I've been happy to sit at the tiller and steer for. Twenty hours or so has kind of been my limit, once it gets much longer than that my enthusiasm runs out and it stops being fun. For perspective, twenty to twenty four hours in Moonshine is the time it takes to get from Schull to Dingle, or Dingle to the Aran Islands. So in a few days it's possible to cover a good portion if the coast, but glued to the tiller apart from heaving-to in order to eat occasionally. Having a wind vane will allow me to stay at sea indefinitely and, crucially on a small boat with limited space for solar panels and batteries, won't use any electrical power.

The vane of a wind-vane autopilot needs to be as light as possible, to allow it to react to the force of the wind acting on it. My intention is to mould it in fiberglass, so I built a plug from plywood in the shape of the finished vane to make the mould from. It didn't make sense to buy a whole thing of mould release wax for one part so on my first attempt I tried using car wax. No bueno, it stuck badly, and I had to break the mould to get it off the plug. I then tried covering the plug in sellotape, which actually seems to work quite well if you're happy to have some ridges from the edges of the sellotape in the finished part.

Here's the bracket which is going to mount the auxiliary rudder to the hull. The bottom end of this bracket is the part of the system that I'm most worried about being broken by the impact of a big wave at sea. So in the picture I've glued all of the bits together, added a fillet of thickened resin and I'm reinforcing it with a LOT of layers of fiberglass cloth. 

In between the auxiliary rudder and the bracket above is going to be this contraption. The auxiliary rudder will sit inside on a pivot which allows it to be lifted out of the water when not in use, while this thing itself sits on a regular pintle and gudgeon set up like any other transom hung rudder. The mini-tiller at the top is where the cables to the wind vane will attach, and will allow it to be used as an emergency steering system if there is any issue with the main rudder.

Here's a comparison photo of the auxiliary rudder alongside Moonshine's primary rudder. The auxiliary rudder can be much smaller than the main rudder because when the windvane is in use the main rudder will be set to provide most of the weather helm, with the auxiliary rudder providing smaller steering inputs. If I got the maths right, the auxiliary rudder will be perfectly balanced around it's axis, allowing it to be turned by the comparatively weak forces coming from the wind vane.

Rudder Revision

Before and after photos of Moonshine's rudder, showing the change from totally unbalanced, typical 1950s rudder design to a partially balanced layout which should be much lighter on the helm.

The ongoing lockdown due to coronavirus means I haven't been able to do any work on Moonshine over the past few weeks. Luckily I've got a few parts from the boat here at home which have been keeping me busy, one of which is the rudder. This job has been on my to-do list since I bought the boat because she has always been uncomfortably heavy to steer, especially in any kind of breeze. This is partially due to the age of the sails, rig setup and a couple of other factors, but since the boat was designed in the 1950s things have progressed a little and modern rudder designs are at least partially balanced. This means that some of the rudder's area is located forward of it's pivot point, balancing out the hydrodynamic forces acting on it and making the boat much easier to steer. So this is what I've done with Moonshine's rudder, removing some area from the trailing edge and adding area forward of the rudder shaft.

While I've been at it, I've also much improved the airfoil profile of the rudder, adding some thickness to the chord around the middle and thinning the trailing edge to a fine point. Basically making it look more like an airplane wing and less like a brick. This will reduce drag and make the boat go faster, but more importantly will reduce the amount that the tiller will need to be turned to produce a certain amount of lift, again reducing the effort needed to steer the boat.

I started by taking an angle grinder to the trailing edge of the rudder, cutting off the part that swept backwards and leaving a straight trailing edge. I thinned this out to a fine point, as close to a typical airfoil section as I could make it, and glued a block of laminated plywood to the leading edge with thickened resin.

After attaching the block of plywood I reinforced all of the edges and the glued joint with fiberglass tape, and then laminated the whole thing with a couple of layers of 300gm CSM. I used resin mixed with filler to smooth out any irregularities and fair the shape into a nice airfoil section, and then gelcoated. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but the real test will have to wait for a windy day when I've got Moonshine back on the water.

Finished!!

Update from Lockdown Land

So along with most of the world Ireland is now in lockdown. No leaving the house except for essential journeys to the shops or to exercise, and then only within two kilometers of your home. Which means life is rather dull at the moment! Fortunately I've got a few parts from Moonshine that I can do some work on to keep busy. First up is the mast base, which was originally painted in a mixture of blue enamel and deep rust but has now been stripped, cleaned and painted in a gloss black which will suit my planned colour scheme a lot better! Before and after:

One Stubborn Hunk of Metal!

Today involved a lot of this; lying in the quarter berths and contorting ourselves into the back of the engine bay to disconnect everything! Those legs belong to my long-suffering Dad, who generously spent a day off work getting covered in oil and grease with me instead of relaxing or doing anything sensible like that.

I've spent the last two days fighting with an engine which really didn't want to come out of this little boat. The current engine is an extremely old, extremely rusty Yanmar 2QM15. It's been wedged in there and just barely fits, giving the boat about double the horsepower that it really needs. Over the years the various sensors and warning lights have succumbed to the effects of time and salt water but it will take more than that to kill the engine block itself. So it runs, usually, in between bouts of diesel airlocks and electrical issues. Right now it's not running, as the air filter has disintegrated and I think a chunk of it is stuck in one of the intake valve seats. So before the engine goes back into service it needs to come out and be overhauled, cleaned up and painted. 

The engine before we went near it. Note the almost complete lack of space to turn a spanner at the sides of the engine. I suspect that the engine may have been placed in position before the deck moulding was added, because trying to lift it over the studs holding the engine mounts in position turned out to be a total mission because the clearance above it was virtually zero!

We won the battle in the end! Now the engine is sitting in position ready to be lifted out of the companionway, as soon as I figure out exactly what I want to do with it. 

When it's working it's great to have the option to go straight upwind at four or five knots regardless of the conditions, and obviously it's very handy to have the engine for getting in and out of marinas. However, something attracts me to the idea of cruising engineless. There's no better boat for learning the arts of surviving on a sailboat without an auxiliary motor, and it's something I've been working on over the last few years. As it is the engine only comes on if the wind dies or if I need to get into a particularly awkward marina berth. Without the engine there would be no more worries about breakdowns, availability of spare parts, fuel levels, stressing about needing the engine to make it to port for a certain deadline or tidal window. All balanced against the comfort and safety factor of having the engine there to use when it's needed, and always being able to charge the batteries at the push of a button. The fact that I don't have the facilities or equipment to easily do the overhaul job myself is also a factor to consider. So while I haven't 100% decided to ditch the motor, the engine is currently up for sale and I am thinking hard about it.

Rebranded Blog, New Beginning, New Adventure

Friends, meet Moonshine! Moonshine is a 1969 Hurley 22; an Ian Anderson designed "four-berth family sailing yacht" with a near legendary reputation for offshore voyaging. Most notably by Attila Vedo, who started his adventures in Ireland six years ago and is currently cruising in the Pacific on his Hurley 22 called Comino. Hurley 22s have also completed multiple Atlantic crossings and regularly feature in Jester Challenges to the Azores and Rhode Island. Since the 1960s people's idea of a four berth family sailing yacht have changed considerably and these days it would more usually be regarded as a small boat for single people with no friends, but the design's reputation for seaworthiness is as strong as ever!

 Moonshine is currently sitting in a boatyard in Limerick in a pretty forlorn state. I have owned her for the past two years, sailed quite a few miles on the west coast of Ireland in pretty average weather and due to working and travelling haven't found the time to do the maintenance work that I should have done. All of that is about to change and plans that I have been making for the last two years are about to be put into action. After spending so much time coming up with ideas and doing drawings for a lot of upgrades and modifications that I want to make, I am very excited to finally get to work. In case you were wondering, I was planning to do this work before the whole coronavirus thing pressed pause on life as we know it. I hadn't expected be able to focus on the work quite this intensely and I don't think I would have found time to start writing blog posts about it. Every dark cloud and all that!

 My goal for this refit is to upgrade Moonshine from an aging 1960's coastal day-sailor to an up-to-date, go-anywhere cruiser. Once this is completed and I've done a few test sails, (tentatively scheduled for June sometime, progress and coronavirus permitting) I plan to take Moonshine on a single-handed, non-stop voyage around Ireland to thoroughly test out all of the upgrades and modifications that I'll be making over the next few months. Fingers crossed, a lot of things will have to go well for that to happen!

Below are a few photos of Moonshine as she exists currently. My plan is to post regular updates here about how progress is going, and any obstacles encountered along the way. Stay tuned! You can also follow me on Instagram for more regular, less verbose updates; find me at @sail.surf.paddle .

Port side. Before I took these pictures I had already removed the mast and rigging. They're on the ground beside the boat, waiting on the replacement of the standing rigging and just about all of the masthead equipment. You can see the state of the teak toe rail and the broken saloon window where a large lobster fishing boat caused the point of an anchor to be driven through the window when both boats were moored side-to in Achill and the tide went out. (That's a long story!)

The deck looking forward. See how a previous owner has slapped on some household masonry paint without sanding anything first, causing everything to start flaking off? Yeah, that's going to take a bit of time to make look good!

Top deck, looking back. Note the duct tape on the stanchion bases. That was a last resort on my sail from Achill to Limerick at the end of last season in an attempt to reduce the amount of water coming into the cabin. It didn't really work!

Inside, looking aft. Sorry for the poor photo, unfortunately you can't put a wide angle lens on a phone. What you can't see in the picture is the level of damp inside the boat, resulting in rust, mold and lifting varnish in lots of places. My plan is to gut the inside of the boat and essentially start again. 

Inside looking forwards. The bulkhead along with the cupboards will hopefully be taken out to give me access to the deck to hull joint and chain plates, which I plan to reinforce before rearranging the layout of the boat to give more usable cooking facilities and storage spaces while at sea.