After I pulled out of launching Heart earlier in April due to some outstanding technical issues that should have been resolved I decided to use the additional time on the hard for an overdue facelift.
I have been washing and scrubbing the decks, sometimes with very hard brushes so small you could have been using them as a toothbrush. Needless to say progress was slow…..

The amount of lichen and other ingrained dirt accumulated over the last 40 years was staggering. I went from greyish/green teak to bright yellow-ish teak.

The colour already reappeared after washing & scrubbing the deck. Left is cleaned, right is dirty old teak.

Once I cleaned everything on deck the boat looked a lot brighter.

Deck after cleaning and scrubbing.

I then applied several layers of teak oil and the colour changed again to mahogany red. The teak was so dry the oil initially just disappeared into the wood. Hopefully there will now be enough oil inside that the colour won’t fade until the winter when I will have to do this all over again.

The final result is quite different from where I started……

Previous owner’s reaction to the revived deck was ‘Gosh’….

I now need to clean the gelcoat as I’m not the cleanest painter…. 🙂

Tomorrow I’ll be fixing the damage done to the hull by crustaeatians, so that she’ll be all ready to go into the water on June 3rd.

I’m back to Blighty to move house and will return just before launch date.

I’ll do a few one day shake down sails locally in order to check all is well and there are no more technical surprises (For the time being that is, she’s a fit 40 years old after all…)
I will also have to finish installing the electronics (Orca 2 plotter, wireless anemometer, NMEA2000 network, wifi, etc) so Heart will be ready to sail south.

So, ….. the planning now looks like I’ll be setting off mid june, head east along the coast until the heat becomes unbearable and the tourists start swarming the beaches. I’ll then leave her in a harbour for the month of August and escape for the mountains. I’ll hopefully return in September to continue sailing south to Elba.

If you want to join me at some point register yourself on the site and send me an email so we can set up up a WhatsApp call to have a chat.