The month started off well with my eldest son Tom and myself fitting the plastic boards to the bunks of the trailer for Longbow whilst one of our dogs, Henry was trying to help as shown in the photo below. These bunks are what the craft rests upon so we had to have these completed before the hull is able to be moved from the build table in the workshop onto the trailer.
The boards for the bunks were kindly supplied by our sponsor TDP and the stainless steel fixings to secure them to the trailer are from our sponsor Avon Stainless Steel Fasteners. Once we had these boards bolted down, Jan & Nigel Oates from our sponsor Below Decks came all the way from Dorset to fit their marine carpet to the bunks to act as a cushioned interface between the boards and the underside of the hull. The photos below show Nigel, who is ex RAF with a meticulous attention for detail, doing an expert job for us with the weather fortunately being kind, given all of this had to be done outside.
At this point I should then have been putting colour coats of paint upon the bottom of Longbow’s hull as she is now ready to receive such. Unfortunately you never know what is around the corner and I fell ill. Since the pandemic our GP has opted to do telephone consultations in the first instance, so they decided from the symptoms I gave over the phone that I had a viral infection. The conclusion was that I should just ride it out but as the days passed it was readily apparent I was deteriorating. After a further consultation they decided it was bacterial and prescribed a heavy course of antibiotics to knock the infection down. That rolled on through the end of the month right into our family holiday at a cottage in Coniston, the Lake District, so I am rather annoyed and please accept my apologies that I have lost the month with regards progress to the build.
In any event it was good to have some time away from the boat and the family all had a great time on holiday, especially with the superb weather whilst we were at Coniston as you can see from the following photos and video.
Well this must be the shortest update I have written to date folks, so sorry about that but trust you will appreciate the last thing you might want to be doing when feeling rough is painting a large hull in a confined space. Hopefully I will be back to my usual grumpy self soon and able to crack on with a better amount of progress by the next update due at the end of September.