Maintenance in Ireland - it has to be done - and a little fun

Warning - for normal people, head to the end of this post and the pictures. For those thinking of buying a boat, read on....

Having arrived in Ireland, did we immediately head off to explore? No, instead we had a guilt trip and did some long overdue maintenance tasks. Things like washing the poor boat off (last time we had water and a hose to do so was in Plymouth, weeks ago) and then some oil changes that were coming due.

To give you an idea of how easy they are on the Nordhavn with the built in oil change pump and easily accessible filters, the main engine oil and filter (20 litres), main engine gearbox oil and filter and genset oil and filter changes took an hour and a half in total including getting the bits ready and tidying up afterwards. Lugging the 30 plus litres of used oil to the disposal tank afterwards was assisted by Andrew / Crocodile Dundee - see, we said that he was a handy guy to have around.

The Diamond Seaglaze aluminium windows and doors are the bane of any owner's life - for those with boats built during the period where the factory applied paint systems were "less than optimum". Keeping painted aluminium in a salty environment always seems silly anyway but the windows and door surrounds fitted to our boat are particularly prone to failures in the paint system. Most frustrating.

It was time to tidy up the door surrounds where water can lay and encourage corrosion. So, as it was calm and dry and warm, we attacked the aft door.

There are many different approaches to a paint system taken by the many Nordhavn owners out there. We followed the "Alodine" (now known as Bonderite) approach which cleans the bare metal and then puts a chromate coating on it via some very nasty chemicals. That is followed by Awlgrip epoxy primer and topcoat. None of this stuff is available easily to retail customers of course. We say no more:

The end result was annoying in the extreme. Although the Alumiprep / Bonderite corrosion protection bit worked beautifully (lots of nice chromate colour on the metal) the Awlgrip topcoat looked a real mess. It seems that the brand new, perfectly clean tin that was used to mix it up in had some oil residues from manufacture or storage as the paint has lots of "fisheyes" in it. It isn't pretty but at least the corrosion has gone. Another topcoat and tidy up next year to make it prettier is needed, cannot be bothered to do it now. Spot the nice dimples:

Funnily enough, we well remember a comment from Bob (he of trolley shopper and sail across the Atlantic whilst suffering from gallstones fame) who said that when you transition to live aboard rather than holiday boaters, cosmetic issues around the boat like polishing become very unimportant, maintenance for safety is key. He was, as he was so often, right.

What else - well, the sealant under the shower door in our cabin needed redoing (lovely smell from curing silicone sealant isn't it?)

As well as all this industry, we did manage to exhume the folding bikes from the lazarette and use the lovely cycle path to Carrigaline a couple of times:

 

Beautiful trip along the river and a good coffee stop / choice of shops at the other end too. We were most impressed by the artistry of the barista lady:

Somehow it seemed just like being back in the UK and visiting a chain coffee shop as she was very friendly and helpful and efficient and from eastern Europe. Little hope for post-Brexit coffee then....