Entering the dry dock was a new experience. After the morning’s tribulations, and not knowing what to expect, we approached cautiously. It wasn’t immediately clear where to line the boat up, and I was very nervous that the river current was behind us pushing us along. But we got in smoothly, and the boat yard staff immediately impressed us with the speed which that they got the dock drained and the boat safely settled. We were in!

 

 

 

We got off to a reasonable start. After spending most of the first day moving stuff off the boat, the shot blaster then appeared and tackled the gunwale. Well, what a job that is. You spend eight hours in a spaceman suit, blasting sand at the hull. It’s dirty, dusty, loud and incredibly messy. Having not known what was involved in shot-blasting, none of us were prepared for the sheer mess of it all. Dust goes everywhere, hardly the best environment for painting!

 

Anyway, we found a routine eventually that involved running around after the shot-blaster putting on the Zinga primer on any bare metal that had appeared. You can’t leave exposed metal for any length of time. 4 hours max we were advised. But this is not easy. Getting a load of shot in the face is not an option, so we had to coordinate closely with the shot-blaster to switch areas regularly, so that we could ensure the metal was primed, without any of the good crew taking a few ‘shots’ of their own.

 

The Boss arrived and soon it was very clear that my paint plans were... rubbish. The Zinga paint received a frown, the coltar-epoxy was rubbished, and the bitumen was, well bitumen is just bitumen really... nothing special. But perhaps more worryingly was the diagnosis about the hull. It was clear the Dutch boatyard had thrown some bitumen on after their efforts, but it may only have been one coating. In places, it appeared as if there was no paint remaining on the hull at all. It was extraordinary. The Boss took me to one side and told me in no uncertain terms that having gone to the effort of dry docking, it was worth doing the job properly. “Yep”, I said “what does that involve?”

 

Well, it turned out that doing the job properly is another way of saying ‘you need to spend money’. Doing the job properly meant shot-blasting the entire hull, not just the gunwale, which would take several days. That was just the beginning, we would then need some Epoxy primer, and at least 4 coats of Epoxy paint... about 16 gallons of the stuff. To get the ‘shine’ we wanted, a Poly Acrylic paint would be used on the gunwale. To clinch it all, the 20 tins of Coltar Epoxy and Bitumen would not be used at all. ‘Gulp’, I said. ‘Gulp’, said my bank manager.

 

Sure enough, the shot-blaster did a test on part of the hull and it seemed to confirm that the hull had very little paint on it.  Well, everyone said, at least it won’t take too long. So, armed with a lot of experts telling us to do something, we did it.

 

Well, unfortunately, the shot-blaster’s test was ‘not representative’. Several parts of the hull had LOTS of paint, and progress became slower and slower. So, we sat and waited.

Several days went by where we could nothing but prime some bare metal from time to time. With all the fine dust and fumes flying around, the inside of the boat became uninhabitable, and the dry dock resembled a dirty beach... a beach with a pneumatic drill going continuously.

 

With the shot-blaster out of the way, we started tackling the upper hull. This involved leveling the whole thing down, either using an orbital sander, or the more vicious flex disk on the angle grinders.

 

At one stage, we had three orbital sanders, and three angle grinders on the go. Three days went by where all I remember of No. 1 was her orbital sanding the entire upper part of the boat. It was an extraordinary effort. Eventually, it all became too much with No. 1. suffering from unpleasant pains in her wrists. Of course, this was a far cry from the lifestyle we had both envisaged when first buying the barge!

 

We started calling friends and family to see if they could help. Things were getting stressful and we were all tired. In hindsight, I wish I had arranged more help in advance, but having been so focussed on all the planning, finding a team to go with it just hadn’t occurred to me.

 

 

With four days left, I calculated the drying times on all the various paints that needed to go on. The results were clear... to get the job done, we would have to paint the entire boat, from top-to-bottom each day... four days in a row. The Epoxy and Poly Acrylic paint would have to go on early in the day, to allow enough drying time for the next coat. For those four days, our lives evolved around drying times. I wasn’t sure how to break this news to the team, but there was a quiet acceptance of what needed to be done. From that point on, most days finished around midnight, but on one particularly tough day, I remember starting early at 6.00 am, and we finished painting at around 2.30 am. Painting black paint in the dark is quite an art.

 

 

 

So, now we just needed to get her home without crashing!