Masts are down. Water line pushed up.

Little by little Worrall Wind is getting dolled up for the big cruise. Despite a chill summer wind, the yard rigger was lifted to the top of the masts on Worrall Wind where he wrapped a harness around each mast. The crane first lifted the mizzen, then the main mast laying them in separate horizontal cradles that were rolled to the mast yard for a rigging refit. Having stepped masts made this a much easier operation than pulling a mast that goes through the deck. Nevertheless, the downed main looked like a tangle of spaghetti.

Russ immediately mounted two brackets on the masts. On the main, he mounted a bracket for a radar reflector. On the the mizzen, he mounted a bracket for the ampair wind/water generator. In the meantime, I worked on cleaning, polishing, and painting the propellor. Thankfully, the bottom painter had already taken most of the growth off the propellor, an ugly - dirty job! He gave me an air pressured drill with wire brush to polish and score the prop. He took pity on me as, I was trying to clean the prop with Brasso and a wire brush. The air drill was amazing, zip, zip and each blade was incredibly shiney. Kind of sounded like a dentist drill so I turned up the IPod and rocked out. Yippee!

Over the course of the weekend, I painted on a base coat and 4 coats of this prop paint that drys like rubber cement and is supposed to keep the critters from attaching.

In between coats, I used the heat gun to strip varnish off the back rails. By the time I was working on the back rails, the sun had come out, and we exchanged out our jackets and earmuffs for sunscreen and wide brimmed hats.

While Russ and I were busy with our tasks, the bottom job painter, was busy raising the water line on Worrall Wind. We are using Trinidad Pettit bottom paint, applying two full coats and a third coat 18" from the water line down. We know once we load on our gear we will need that line raised a little or we will be growing a beard on the gel coat. Our starboard side was already pushed down with the weight of the diesel tanks. Once the painter was done on Friday, Russ scrubbed the boat down on Sunday morning, preparing to polish, but got sidetracked taking off the swim ladder and mounting brackets on the transom for the Hydrovane windsteering system. We didn't head home until dusk and were exhausted. Polishing will have to wait until our next trip down.