Pre-Blog Activity
It was a sunny, sparkling summer day in January when I first hopped aboard Vogelsang. There are quite a few Hoods moored around Sydney waterways and many of them appear to be little more than mooring minders. They are an old boat – the first production GPR yachts to be build in Australia according to what I have read. But I will post more about the Hood class another time. Vogelsang is probably a fairly early build of this class of boat. The fabric of the soft furnishings below deck is orange with thin stripes of other red/orange hues and purple (Groovy baby, yeah!). To me, that places the fabric (and the boat) to around the late 60s possibly early 70s. Vogelsang was the second boat I had looked at. Compared to the Hunter 19 I had just looked at, her interior below deck seemed palatial. Not too long after that first boarding I had negotiated the purchase.
Soon the glory of lazy summer holidays and the innocent optimism which a new year brings had passed. The exuberant hedonism of the Sydney new year and its propensity to cause one into a rash boat purchase was over for another year. It was back to work. All of a sudden it was mid-February and the date which I had booked Vogelsang to be hauled out was upon me. Naturally, this coincided with a project for which the timeline had, inevitably, slipped. So, although I had planned to take a few days off to work on the boat, in fact, I was right in the middle of a development project, endless revisions and calls at all times of the day and night from an anxious client and designer. What followed were three days of:
- getting up at the crack of dawn and making my way to Noakes at McMahon’s Point (the shipwrights where Vogelsang was hauled out and placed on hard stand),
- work on the boat for a couple of hours,
- hopping on board the boat and working on my laptop over wireless internet,
- doing some more work on the boat into the twilight,
- going home and working on the laptop again until the early hours of the AM,
- repeat above.
Luckily my mate Andrew, who has owned a life-time of boats in only thirty years, and who has been aboard many, many more, would drop by each afternoon to giggle at my progress and lend a hand and advice.
Originally, before hauling her out, I had envisaged an amazing program of works for Vogelsang all to be completed within the three days she was to be hauled out. In the end, I only managed to antifoul her, repair the rudder, repair the gudgeon, repair the rudder post and housing and give a bit of beauty treatment to her sides.
When it came time to putting her back in the water, there was only one problem. I had used a soft anti-foul (Norglass) on the boat and it was, well… very soft. The travel lift operator explained that lifting her up in the slings would drag the antifoul off the bottom and onto the sides of the hull. The shipyard kindly let me keep the boat in hard stand over the weekend (on the condition I didn’t work on her). On Monday she went back in. Only a little bit of slipping of the antifoul occurred under the slings. About one inch. Lesson: if you are going to have your boat lifted in slings, don’t use a soft anti-foul.
Once back in the water, the 5hp outboard seemed to push the boat along much easier with her beard shaved off the keel. Having a rudder that steered seemed to help too.
