August 2009

9th August Start Mirror week – break my gooseneck on Monday – end Mirror week. Spend the time re-checking nuts and bolts.

13th August - invade Pat and Pam Morgan’s yacht complete with drawings and spreadsheets, persuade Pat to check my numbers. It takes 3 hours, not the half hour I’d suggested! Never mind, several errors were discovered and corrected.

20th August – get last quote for Nuts and bolts, decide on SIG fixings as they are close to any other price and are local, on Ransomes Europark, so if we need some more items at short notice we can easily collect. Order Nuts and bolts…over £2,000 worth!

27th August – Hire a drop side lorry to collect galvanised steel from fabricator, put the smaller bits in my garage but take the 7 large box sections to be fitted onto the piles by a company, Martin Childs, who are at Brandon and normally make lock gates and other large structures. Each box weighs about 130Kg so its either a crane or forklift for loading and unloading. Just out of interest thought I’d try and lift one, decided it was a bad idea when it seemed to be glued to the floor and stopped trying before I damaged anything.

28th August – Was due to sail in the OK nationals at West Mersea, but the wind was gusting 40 knots so racing was cancelled for the day and I came home. Just as well as the stainless plates were delivered to my house in the late afternoon and I helped to unload them into my garage. There must be a ton of steel, it certainly felt that way and the driver was pleased he got a hand to unload it.

Simon Shaw