Today we slipped Pipit and put her in the boatshed for the weekend ready for work on monday and putting her back in the water on tuesday. Every three months we take the boats out for a bottom clean and to service the jet drives. It is a bit of a process involving the JCB and a cable and lots of belts and braces approach as is the Health and Safety culture! We can also only do it at high water which today was at 8:30am so not an unreasonable time 🙂

Pipit leaves the dock with Matt driving

I back the trailer down the slipway making sure that I have George tell me when I am 1/2 meter from the edge of the end so the trailer doesn’t end up in deep water! Then Matt follows my hand signals and drives the boat onto the trailer.

I drive the JCB up the slipway towing the jet boat while the slack in the cable (also attached to the trailer) is taken up (back up system).

Matt Boat hanging out on the bow while she comes up the slipway as there is no way down till we get him the ladder!

Finally out of the water with an enormous amount of weed on her bottom no wonder why she wasn’t getting up to speed. This is the worse the bottom has ever been since the boats came south as a result of such high temperatures. In Jan and Feb the minimum temperature never got below 0 and in Feb we averaged 7C! It took Matt and I 5 hours of power washing to remove the weed and that isn’t a perfect job either.

Global climate change has finally effected me on a personal level! I have changed the maintenance schedule to haul out once every two months in the summer now for bottom cleaning.

Before she was even in the shed Tommy was hard at work ripping out the interior panels to run some wiring for a new alarm at the outside helm station.

As you can see the alarm is nicely fitted it will allow us to know if we have an engine overheat situation etc when you are at the outside helm position coming alongside a fishing vessel etc.

Finally we pulled her into the shed to dry for the weekend before we service the jet drives, check the anchor and service the engines. Lots to do on monday morning!