Hello friends!
A lot of time has passed and a lot of water has flown into the sea. I am getting close to the final stretch of my PhD, but this summer I was back in Estonia for an internship.
On the weekends, we also had some time for working on Kvark and sailing. Here are some pictures.
It was the coldest May in many years here and outside temperatures were not high enough to work on the boat with epoxy and paint. We found out that the rudder hinges were starting to give way, the current pintle and gudgeon system has a bad cutting edge. Thus we removed them, welded some more metal to them and refitted the hinges. We also installed a stainless steel plate under the bow-facing part of the keel to protect from friction. We’ve fiberglassed and repainted some unfortunate spots on the boat that had received a bit of damage when docking carelessly, nothing major.
The big question was how to get the boat to its natural element. Last time we used an expensive crane at a different port. This time, we did it like Ancient Egyptians – using logs for rollers and levers for lifting. Worked well enough. To get it out we will install some big wheels under the cradle and use a winch.
Our previous jib was oversized, now we had a local sailmaker cut an appropriate one, the boat handles much better and nobody was seasick!
We’ll be sailing as much as we can in the next weeks in Käsmu bay and around the coast there.
Unfortunately we don’t have a good camera to take sailing videos, but there’s one I took with my phone.
Until next time!
Home port of Kvark, home village of many famous captains
Kvark in its winter sleep
Working on cleaning the rudder
The gudgeon-and-pintle rudder hinges had nearly destroyed themselves during the previous year.
We dismantled the hinges in order to refresh them.
The underside of the keel has been roughed up by the seabed, Uku fashioned a stainless steel armor plate for it.
The bow transom has lots of sharp wooden edges and is the first point to make contact, you can see that it has taken some blows.
We decided to build a cradle for Kvark in order to make lifting and moving it a bit easier.
Uku crafting a keel protector.
How to get Kvark into the water? On rollers!
Getting ready to roll it in.
Under sail!
The boats medic.
In Võsu port.
