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Monday 3 October 2011

A bit of painting 2-4 October 2011

We arrived at the boat Sunday tea time after visiting mum on the way. The afternoon was wonderful and we arrived before the sun was to low in the sky to make driving difficult but to late to really move off the moorings. One or two of the other boaters were sat on the back of their boats fishing with lots of small fish feeding on the surface. Suddenly they started jumping out of the water and this was pike about a foot long, it came completely out of the water and travelled about four feet in the air before dropping back in by one of the boats. We were to witness this another couple of times before darkness fell, but although it cleared the surface each time it travelled no where as far as the first jump.

We ate onboard and had a very quiet night other than hearing the rain at some point, these moorings are so quiet it is unbelievable, no road traffic and very few boats passing.

Monday morning we set off at about 10 am and an hour later we were on the new moorings at March. I hogged the centre of the moorings as it was very shallow at each end, but did shuffle backwards  a bit to let a Springer moor ahead of us. The reason I moored here was to re-black between the rubbing strake and the gunwale.
I stood the tin of paint in a bucket which I filed with hot water to improve the paints fluidity and then set to with a disposable foam brush, unfortunately it was not up to the job and disintegrated about thirds of the way along the hull so I had to finish off with an ordinary paintbrush which was not so good. 
After lunch Diana went to check out the town moorings and it wasn’t long before she phoned to say there was lots of room, so I moved Harnser along. We now had the port side against the bank. After a trip to the hardware shop where I bought a stiff tar brush and a very cheap set of paint rollers I set to on the port side, First I tried the fluffy roller which worked a treat so stuck with it, much easier and better coverage that ether the standard brush or the foam one. This was followed by putting some grey top coat on the patches of primer that I put on the roof last week. Its a real bodge job, just scraping the flaking paint, treating the bits with Kurust, a prime and top coat, not bothering with any sanding as the whole lot needs to come off and be done properly.

Following all this activity we thought it was time for a pint, so I did a Mike and walked across the road to The Ship in my slippers, here we were spoilt for choice with 6 bitters on the pumps at £2.80 a time. In the end we had Conker and Owl which finished the afternoon nicely.

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