Albin Vega - a big boat?

Is Albin Vega, with it's majestic 27ft, a big boat or not? Well, it depends on what you are compairing it with. Compared with Elisson's yacht, or the Maltese Falcon, it's rather small - a 1/10th of their size. When I try to dock it, it's rather big ;) When we're 3 ppl on it, it's quite small again. But today I cleaned the hull and painted it with AntiFouling, and let me tell you: it's HUGE!! When you must work under it and old AntiFouling is dripping from it, or new antifouling is splashing, it's really a never ending story to get it painted. 

Degreasing it took around 2hrs, and I've done it with a very hard sponge - which makes it unnecessary to sand the old AntiFouling paint. But I had not idea that the old AntiFouling paint is so disolveable, at least when in contact with the degreaser solution. 


While waiting for the hull to dry, I've done some shopping: got this little fellow that's supposed to keep me warm at night:

And a new bucket and some LED lights to replace the old ones. 1.5W instead of 10W for the same light!!! Fun fact: traditionally, the navigation lights have been using white lightbulbs and a green/red/white enclusure that changed the light color. Not possible with LEDs anynore, since white LED light + green enclosure gives blue light. So there are special green/red LEDs for navigation lights.



Painting the hull was a major undertaking, I had to dress up with a protection suit, breathing mask, protective glasses and gloves. And the process took forever, something like 3.30hrs and it got dark etc. I have no idea how it turned out, I guess tomorrow's the day. One thing is for sure, next time the boat will get out of the water, I'll have to scrap all the paint layers and redo everything. There were sections which were a mess - old paint came down when I painted new layers over it. Now you can see at least 3 different colors of old paint: white, blue, red and the latest was black, which is what I've used this time too...



Today I've also repaired the compass, it's fixed in the cockpit wall to the cabin and the wall always got wet, so I took the compass out and put a band of butill tape all around, hopefully it'll keep the water out now.

2019 - new sailing year

After turning down an offer in Seattle, I am super excited to start the new sailing year 2019 now! 

Got to the boat today after a long break and everything is alright, except for the amount of mold I've found. So first thing was to wipe the whole mold clean.

I've also checked the voltage with which the batteries are being loaded from shore power - 14.7V - hope it's compatible with gel batteries.

I've also managed to fix the NASA Clipper Duet screen - new LCD solved the problem. New covers are also there, to protect the LCDs.

Tomorrow is the big day, scrub the whole under waterline hull and apply antifouling.




Oh, happy boat ownership

And so it begins: during the first weekend we spent on the boat, we discovered that the v-birth smells quite badly like mold. The life vests (the old 'big' model) were stuck in the front locker, blocking all the air circulation there, and it seems the hull-deck joint is leaking a bit, so the combination resulted in mold in the front locker. I took off the panel between the bed and the front locker, and the wood delamination is quite severe there. 


Also, the stove (previous owner said it's a diesel, now I have my doubts if it's not propane) has a leaking chimney-deck connection. Tried to seal it, let's see how it looks like next weekend. 


I also started working on the big table (with 2 support plugs, we also have a small one with only one support), it needs some TLC too. 

Finally found the right boat

After looking at around 6 Albin Vegas and 2 Marieholms 26, I finally found the the right sailboat (or the other way around?!) - an Albin Vega 26, hull number 927, currently named Skip and located in Andijk NL. It's got loads of new sails and a Yanmar 2GM installed in 1985. New name: Spirit.