new home

I took the day off work to motor Mudlark round to her new mooring on the Itchen which is much more convenient, as we no longer need a dinghy to get onboard :)
and we now have the luxury of an electricity connection.
The voyage from the Hamble went smoothly, and we had plenty of help from the people in the boatyard, unfortunately that ment there were plenty of people to watch me scratching her paint on the pontoon :(

Approaching the Itchen bridgeHer new berth

now with curtains :)

I've had a busy if hungover sunday, tidying up and getting Mudlark ready to move to the Itchen.
I've had a go at scrubbing the weed off the rudder, although the water is so murky I can only see the top 6 inches of the rudder blade!
Mum has stitched up some curtains for the wheelhouse, I'll try to take some pics for the next post
Dad has been painting the guard rail on the port side, luckily the weather men got it wrong, and the rain didn't really happen today :)

We've been painting the fiddly bits on the foredeck, before painting the deck grey, as I figured we'd drip white paint all over the place when painting the hand rails etc... Freshly painted ventilators! I had some signal red paint brightens up the insides nicely

electrickery

Spot the odd one out! I'd decided to check the navigation lights, port and starboard were fine, but the stern light didn't work, so I spent the morning checking out the wiring. I started with the bulb, which was fine, so I got the test meter out, and after much poking and tracing wires, it turned out that out one wire from the light was connected to ground in the distribution box, and the other was connected to ground behind the dash, instead of the switch! see if you can spot the odd one out in the picture above....
Clearly the light never had worked in the first place!
Dad has had a busy day, painting the foredeck, and cleaning the weed off the bottom of the dinghy

now drier than ever!

This week dad made up a cover for the locker on the aft deck, it fits over the angle iron I welded on, so now the rain water runs off onto the deck, instead of down into the cabin below!
The weather gods decided to test our work thoroughly, it rained almost continuously all afternoon, and the new cover worked :)
I hid from the rain, and scraped more old paint off the inside of the cabin below.

nice and warm

I've got my wood stove working at last, just in time for a the weather to warm up!
The stove is a boatman, made up north by a bloke called eddie.
After fitting the flue to the stove, I painted some undercoat over yesterdays primer on the roof of the fore cabin. Dad has been repairing a section of the rubbing strake near the bow.
I put some wood in to give it a go, it was nice and warm down below this afternoon :)
The flue from the stove runs up beside the exhaust, you can see the black stove pipe at the back of the wheel house, this is a narrowboat one, which can be lifted off when going under bridges

She's looking a lot tidier now :) dad has done some painting during the week, and more today.
Here he is painting I've been working on the roof of the front cabin today. After cleaning off the rust and paint I found a couple of bits that needed welding, one covered by a bit of filler which went flying as soon as I touched it! it covered a hole one inch across, and goes some way to explaining why the bathroom has been so damp. In the pic you can see the patch I welded in to fix it.
The stripes in this pic are patches of old rust where wooden slats were once attached, I painted them with grey primer after cleaning them up.

It's been a busy day on the Hamble, lots of people were out to play in the sunshine :)
I got the welder out, and put some angle iron round the locker on the aft deck, making a flange, so that water can run off onto the deck rather than into the locker! Dad has been volunteered to make the new lid to fit.
I had to rig up a tarpaulin to keep the wind off, which was blowing down the river with gusto.
Dad has been leveling up the sink, we'd got fed up with water running off the wrong end of the draining board.

luxury cruise

It's been an exciting day, with the help from one of dads friends we took Mudlark out for a cruise down the river, down to southampton water and back again. You can see Fawley power station in the last pic!

We moored up facing in the opposite direction so that the sun shines on the port side of the wheel house, which makes painting it much easier :)
After lunch I did exactly that, cleaning up rust spots and priming them, so she's spotty again!
Dad cleaned up the inside of the cuddy that houses the exhaust.