I spent the morning repairing the end of the guttering at the stern of the boat, which captures all the rain and sends it down a run-off to the side. The port side never really drains though as the boat has a slight lean to the right – almost all the heavy stuff is on the right, and there’s not enough ballast to compensate it.
The net result is a very rusty and corroded end to the guttering, to the point now that water overflows into the engine bay. You can see the port side on the left (after removing the flaking rusty bits), compared to the starboard side on the right.
I used a dremel with a wire wool brush to remove most of the surface rust, and then cleaned it up and painted over with some vactan to help neutralize and seal any remaining patches of rust. I then built the end back up using some epoxy putty. It’s not something I’ve used before, but looks promising so far.
A bit of filing down the rough edges and a few licks of paint and hopefully it’ll soon look like new again, assuming the putty holds strong.
Jobs done for now, I was closely watching Sarah’s progress on the train back, and exchanging messages on WhatsApp. The 12 minutes to make the change at Birmingham New Street slowly decreased down to 5 minutes as the train was delayed. Luckily she made it in time – good job too as the next train to Bilbrook after that was 2 hours later due to a cancellation.
That’s the end of train journeys home for this trip, hooray! Happily reunited on Oliver we caught up with each other’s news.
Sarah’s lost 1st 4lb since the start of the holiday, and now weighs less than I do – the only downside is her trousers are a bit loose around the waist now and require a safety pin to hold them up!
Tomorrow we tackle the Wolverhampton 21 flight of locks – looks like it’s going to be a scorcher of a day. Hopefully it won’t be as much of a melter as Hatton was in 2015.
Good to see your happy faces back together again. Hope you whizz up the Wolverhampton flight before it gets too hot – I did read that they’re ‘easy’ so fingers crossed for you.
We carry ballast in the form of 56 lbs weights (4 of them) as used to be used on ‘spud’ scales and move them around according to need. A lot of weight in a fairly small space. We bought ours from the Trust shop in Saltisford Arm.
Enjoy the “21” but the incinerator is a bit whiffy around halfway up! Have you settled on a route yet when you get to the top?
What’s this 1 stone 4lbs. I thought you would have gone metric by now. 21 locks on a hot day and you may loose another 3 lbs and then you would have lost 1.5 stones!
If you adopted Richard and Jane’s solution and moved those 4 56lb weights around often enough you would loose even more.