D-Day, the day Toucan got splashed! “Slim” finally arrived and fitted the new prop, we filled in time doing some more polishing while we anxiously awaited our scheduled time of high noon to be lowered into the water. The last few days there hasn’t been a breath of wind, but wouldn’t you know it, today the wind was up and blowing a good 15 kts (thanks Murphy). There wasn’t much manoeuvring space beyond the travel lift area, so Raphael the yard manager came over to check whether Bruce was still happy to go ahead – hmm, let’s see, wind is going to be a problem, never driven this boat before – ‘Ok let’s give it a go’. The man is a legend.
She’s a wide, wide boat (24ft) and so it took a lot of care and time to extricate her from her tight spot on the hardstand and ever so slowly move her into position over the water. Then down she went and we hopped on to check for any water leaks and ensure the engines started before they released us. There was a small amount of water in the bilge, but the taste test determined it was fresh water (no doubt the result of leaks through the hatches during the winter) so we were good to go! The skipper did a brilliant job of getting her out of the slipway without any scrapes, and then we motored the huge distance of ½ NM to the marina at Lighthouse Point where we intend to stay for another few days while we load all the boat equipment we sent by sea-freight and continue the clean up.
Boats are ‘winterised’ here due to the freezing temperatures, which basically means putting anti-freeze in all the water systems. To ‘de-winterise’ them involves opening all the taps and flushing the system with fresh water. So we filled up the water tanks and started the process of flushing the pink gunk out of the system. And then almost gagged – the stench was awful, no delicate way to say this, it smelt like vomit. And to top it off, we have fresh water leaks in both hulls that seem to be coming from the water tanks but we have no way of determining this without pulling off half the internal panels. So now we have a boat that’s seeping fresh water and smelling like the aftermath of an 18- yea-old’s birthday party. Charming!
Not much we can do about it in the short-term as tomorrow we’ve booked our van to collect our sea-freight from the shipping company. Ah, the cruising life, gotta love it!