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John

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Rebuilding a very old winch

One thing about rebuilding old bronze winches is that you never get a diagram and it takes some serious MacGyver time to fix things that are broken.

Here are some more detailed pics:

Nice thing was you can actually buy anything on the internet these days — including little springs.  I bought replacements from Barnes Group.  While it was only £30, it was over about 3 orders getting to the right spring.

Note:  Don’t forget to block the cockpit drains.  If I haven’t told you the story, yes one of pawls dropped into the cockpit, bounced twice and down the drain.  Since they are stainless magnets don’t work.  And diving in Brighton Marina to find it doesn’t hold up next to the waters off Zanzibar.

A Delivery with Dad

One of the best parts of having a boat in some lost place is doing the delivery to bring it somewhere else. Like towards back home.On this trip my dad and I flew out to Tallinn and took a taxi to Lahusalu where Christina and I had left it.  Aside from w ai ting for our bags to be delivered we had an uneventful sail to Haapsalu where a clear air gale of 30 knots in the marina locked us down.E ventually the wind let up and we carried on with the trip tearing through the islands under two reefs and a little bit of rolled out jib.Unfortunately that didn’t stop the leech of the old sail — and an old patch from sailing across Finland the season before — from tearing. When we found a place to go in at the tiny little port town of Trilgi, we also found the entire Estonian racing fleet that had been holed up for the last three days waiting for the wind to drop themselves.  They literally decided to get at least one race off — across the bay.  The little cafe owner looked completely shell shocked.

After a repair we picked up and headed out across the Baltic, stopping in at Faro for a few hours and then making landfall off Nykoping at the standard 2 am and it was still light enough to make our way up the channel even if we didn’t have the moving map.

Great trip.

Swedish sailing in the Swedish Archipelego

In August, I left the US and flew into Stockholm with Paul Morris and sailed from Vestervik to Stockholm (via the Södertälje Canel) then on to Sandhamn, Marieholm and over to Finland.  Eventually we made our way to Helsinki and then crossed to Tallinn, Estonia.

Frames in Summer

It is pretty rare for it to get to 40 degrees in the UK.  Of course it is when it does that you decide that is the time to pull the boat out of the water, replace the engine and have about 10 frames replaced.

Need to dig up pictures of the final epoxied up pieces if I have them, and the name of the guy that crawled into the lazerette for a couple of baking weeks working with glue.  He’s the hero.  Right now I’ve only got this one that shows all of the new fastenings when we were doing the final filling and repainting.

Building a Nav Station

Nordic Eagle originally had an interesting combination of equipment — high-end 1960s Sailor VHF and Single-side band, B&G Depth and Speedo, and a set of random home hobby toggle switches to keep it all running off a standard car battery.

First step for me was moving a bookshelf that was under this stuff and putting in a new frame for a decent hinged panel.  This included moving some random connectors and mounting them on the new base of the enclosed box.

And then adding in a new interior GPS, stereo and the original swithes as a temporary holding point.

Then of course I replaced the switch boxes with a proper distribution panel from Blue Sea Systems but amazingly didn’t take a picture at that point!  The picture below is now 4 years later and you can see we’ve had some water issues causing the pre-installed screws to rust, but amazingly 2400 miles and 5 years later I’ve never had a breakdown with distribution.

Finally Found a Wooden Boat

After what felt like months taking week-end trips to muddy harbours and chaotic boatyards and definitely years of looking at the back pages of Classic Boat, I had a boat put through my door the old fashioned way — in a letter from Peter Temple in Woodbridge.

Not the pre-war gaff rigged work boat I was unrealistically thinking of or a 8-meter that somehow developed cabin room, but a Swedish designed and built wooden sloop from 1966.

Nordic Eagle

Make:  Havsornen II

Yard:  Storebro Bruks

Designer:  Olle Enderlein

Interesting and definitely worthy of a trip up to Suffolk to take a look.

Nordic Eagle is imported to the UK

Hello world!

Always the best post of all — starting a new blog.

For the record this blog will be initially made up of historical posting back dated since I wasn’t disciplined about keeping a log.  But I have dug up and organised a small ton of photos and being a complete nut for other peoples boat restoration blogs, I couldn’t keep these hidden.

Great thing about working on wooden boats — you get to do everything at least twice.  As you will see if I get all the jobs I’ve done in here.