First day back after the Christmas break and the storms and heavy rain to recover Chance and bail out the water in the bilges

 After the Christmas break has come to an end it was time to go down to Chance and survey the damage the high winds and rain had done to Chance. Thankfully, Chance was in reasonable condition given that I had not been able to get down to her apart from securing the cover on the ground so that it did not get damaged anymore than it had already. 

Chance had taken on a lot of water in her bilges because I was able to get the cover over her before today given the high winds and the rain made it dangerous to work on her decks. So today was the first day that it was safe to get on her decks and get her cover back over her again and start to empty out her bilges which were full of fresh water, a bad type of water to have in any bilge. 

Now that I have the cover back over her topsides and tied down again, it was time to make a start on emptying out the water that had collected in her bilges. This was a job I had done before the Christmas break, but having the cover come off the boat I had to do it all again and this time there was a lot more water to remove, not just the odd pint or two, however, this time it was gallons of water from one end of Chance's bilge to the other end. 

So now it is a matter of letting the bilge dry out again and start again. One good thing to come out of all this was that the four sections of bilge are all watertight and so the hull is still holding water and not leaky through the plank seams, so that is a positive note. 

The next time, I am at Chance I will start to set up lights through the inside of the boat and a few power sockets so that I can use power tools as well as battery tools. 

Also,  I have to sort out the pile of floorboards which I have in the temporary outside workshop in my yard and clean them up and paint the undersides and pit them back in the boat and put thin plywood cover panels over the floorboards so I can walk through the inside of Chance safely. Once the floorboards are down then work can start on the inside more easily than before. 

s you all know we had to strip out the inside of Chance to to inspect the hull and frames and ribs to see how much work was going to be needed to sort the condition of the hull. Now that we know that we can make plans to sort this out over the coming months and as the weather is against us to work outside on the planking repairs we can start on some of the interior work instead. 

So we can going to make a start on the fore cabin and clean down the hull planking and get rid of all the old paint and make a start on rebuilding the cabins it was originally made in 1948 when Chance was commissioned.  So we have our hands full for the foreseeable future so as they say on wards and upwards.   

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