Winterisation round-up 2017

Following crane-out there are a number of winterisation tasks on my to-do list. The one that I always tackle first is hosing-down our Macwester Malin’s hull to remove the worst of the season’s fouling. This year, as can be seen above, there was heavier weed growth than I’ve ever witnessed (on our yacht).

Still, nothing that would cause any problem to our type of sailing, and certainly much less than the growth that I spotted on our chum’s Colvic Watson earlier in the year [above]. She sported a rather impressive matching goatee-beard at the pointy end too.

Next up is swapping out the impeller, flushing away the salt water, and filling our Lombardini diesel engine’s cooling system with anti-freeze. I didn’t bother swapping out the impeller this year, as I plan on buying a new one for the start of next season.

When it came to winterising our Lavac heads, I thought that I’d try something new. The idea was to ensure that there was no water left in the system, including the intake. With this in mind I shoved a length of hose (kindly provided by Calloo’s skipper) up the inlet.

The other end was positioned with care in a strategically placed bucket of anti-freeze. All I needed to do was nip on-board and pump the anti-freeze through the whole system and the job would be done. Unfortunately, this didn’t work despite various adjustments. There must have been too much air leakage to enable enough suction in the system. This is something I’ll need to improve upon for next year.

We remembered to bring one of the children’s sledges with us to drag the Hippo buoy through the mud. That goes some way to reduce the energy-sapping nature of removing our mooring ground tackle for the winter. Despite that, this year, the crew put in too much effort and jiggered her back.

Above; note the promenade wall that was a feature of the previous post [see here].

While I’ve still to brim our Macwester Malin’s fuel tanks, and complete one or two other tasks, the biggest item remaining on the pre-Christmas to-do list is to address the gearbox problem. While some might just put the loss of gears on the last day of the season down to a glitch, I’m not the kind of skipper who’s comfortable taking a gamble on that sort of thing …so it looks like the gearbox might have to come out to see if any remedial work is required. Yay!