Getting Songster Ready

Once Songster was in the water we had a few more jobs to do to get her ready for the season.  The major jobs; replacing the VHF cable, replacing a broken block and replacing some halyards, required Bob to go up the main mast – 14 metres above the deck.  Bob donned the bosun chair and safety harnesses and I winched him up.  All the jobs required Bob to go up the mast five times over two or three days.  I developed quite the pectoral muscles with all the winching and Bob became less and less happy hanging by lines 14 metres above a hard deck.

It's a long way up - and down!

While in Australia browsing through chandleries, Bob happened upon a nifty product which will indicate if there is water in the fuel.  This product wasn’t on our list but looked like a good thing to have.  So Bob tried it out on Songster’s fuel tank.  You paint a bit of solution on the end of a dip stick and lower it to the bottom of the tank.  If the solution turns red, there is water in the tank.  Well we got the red colour.  We borrowed a fuel pump to pump out the water, which being heavier than diesel fuel, concentrates in the bottom of the tank.  Not only did water come out but then a thick brown sludge came through.  This was not what should be in the tank!

Sludge from the bottom of the fuel tank

So back to our saviours, the Marvellous Marlin Men in Red.  We had a nasty build up of algae requiring the fuel tanks to be cleaned.  This is a massive all day five step process consisting of pumping out the contaminated fuel through filters, washing the tanks several times with various solutions, adding biocide to the filtered fuel then pumping it back into the clean tank through more filters.  That impulse buy of a water test kit was worth its weight in gold (even if it did cost us several hundred euros to fix the problem).  A fuel filter clogged with algae cutting out the engine in the middle of rough seas is not a prospect we would relish!

The fuel pumping set up

Before cleaning

All clean

Our final splurge was to spruce up below decks with some new carpets.  The carpets that came with the boat were getting very tatty.  Lantana, who made us a cockpit enclosure last year, made us lovely new carpets.  Songster was looking very smart and all ready to sail.

New carpets