2018 pre-season

It’s been a long, cold winter in Scotland, with more snow than we’ve seen for a long time in the central belt. The photograph above shows ice in the harbour at Aberdour, which isn’t something that we’ve witnessed before.

Over the closed season our reconnaissance trips included the harbours at Alloa, Broughtyferry, and Wormit amongst many others. We spent a few days at Kilconquhar Castle in February, where we cremated marine ply taken from our Macwester Malin during the heads rebuild. Call me sentimental, but I didn’t want to just toss it into landfill.

Our pre-season prep this year included repairs to our cockpit tent (including replacing three windows), and replacing the drive cone in the gearbox following a gearbox issue on the last day of the season [see here]. The gearbox project turned out to be more expensive than expected, and with hindsight we would probably have considered replacing it with a new gearbox if we had known the final tab in advance. Still, it’s done and our 30HP Lombardini diesel is ready to go for the new season …which is a result.

We fitted a new impeller, and changed the engine oil and oil filter just before crane-in. We bought a Majoni fender step, and 100m of 8mm braided line which I’m going to use to replace the one and only halyard remaining from 2011 when we purchased our yacht. We’ll still have plenty of spare left for any other requirements.

In terms of our mooring tackle, we replaced the 20mm chain that runs through our hippo buoy. We only needed a metre of chain, but were given a price of £42 for a metre (galvanised). As the supplier only had three metres of chain left in stock, they gave us a good deal on all three metres so we opted for the additional chain, meaning that we have two spare 1m sections for future replacement. I’m going to inspect the rest of the mooring tackle again mid-season, as I want to be sure that there’s no excessive wear, which will be easier to spot when our Macwester has pulled some of the chain up out of the mud.

When it came to actually reinstalling the mooring tackle, this year, we decided to launch the dinghy and row the Hippo buoy over to our mooring from the club. Once the tide had dropped, it was a shorter distance from the dinghy to our mooring. That worked well, and we intend to adopt that process from now on.

This year we managed to find some time to work on our Macwester Malin’s hull (hurrah!). We cleaned it, then T-cut it, then polished it. This made a big difference as the hull was previously more of a matt finish. If we get the time, we plan on carrying out the same process to the topsides once our Macwester Malin is back in the water.

One fly in the ointment over the winter was the slow realisation that our yacht was being targeted. On a number of occasions we found large disposable paper cups (the kind you get from Starbucks) complete with soggy tea bags on our yacht’s deck, which caused staining. That left us wondering what else might have been done that wasn’t so obvious and, although the paper cup tipping appears to have stopped now, we remain concerned about tampering. After a bit of detective work we figured out the most likely source, so that’s one we’ll need to keep an eye on.

Crane-in next!