May 2022 – Part 2
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Our second half of May began still in the boatyard – at the time of writing it’s been slightly over four weeks since we first arrived at SRF and it looks like it might be a while longer before they’ve finished with us! However, we have now been moved yet again, this time into the painting shed for preparations to begin for the next stage.
Andy had earlier talked to the guys about some steering issues and they suggested a set of ‘fins’ be welded to the stern to improve things, so that was yet another job added to the steadily lengthening To Do list – creating the fins began almost immediately and these were soon welded to the hull, and throughout all of the works our appointed engineer, Bay, was busy internally with the electrics etc. so it did feel like things were really happening again.
The paint team then got started with covering the top half of Shensi in polythene, ready to do their stuff … we had been told we could stay in the boat whilst the painting was in progress but within minutes the fumes and the noise made it unbearable so we headed out for fresh air and some peace and quiet – it was bad enough for us, and we could only imagine how much worse it was for the dogs in that environment.
Plenty of seemingly small things were also going on, mostly invisible to us (except the repainting, of course), although everything seemed to be taking forever to get started/finished, which was all quite frustrating at times.
Nicki was still suffering quite badly and had had to resort to crutches for even short distances, so lucky Andrew got to do ALL the dogwalking every day whilst she was out of action, but as a bonus he did get to see some of the beautiful scenery along the dyke at Harlingen. Having the car now came into its own, as it gave us a greater measure of freedom during those weeks although we still couldn’t go too far from the boatyard as I needed to be able to keep a close eye on things. We did however manage a few short forays into the town centre that included lots of sitting around whiling away our time until we could safely return to the boatyard later each day.
Eventually though Nicki really began to improve enough that we made a visit to the nearby town of Bolsward for a few hours, wandering the streets and browsing the shops.
On our return to the boatyard, it was exciting to see that the painters had been hard at work as Shensi was now back to a lovely glossy black – well, most of her was at that stage. Around this point and after some discussion we decided to have a ‘go faster’ red stripe added to the paintwork just above the waterline so that had to be arranged with the paint team for their next stage.
By the end of May painting was complete, red stripe and all, and we were returned to the water – that in itself made us feel as though there was light at the end of the tunnel, although there were still several ongoing issues and we could see we would be in the boatyard for a while longer.
