Boat Works in Cape Town

Everyone who owns a boat or yacht knows that no matter how new your boat is, there will always be something broken, about to break or dirty. Catching Up had just finished an onslaught with hundreds of people touching, feeling and walking through her at the Boat Show. She was in need of a well deserved clean. After doing a full exterior detailing she was back in a presentable condition. Since leaving Knysna, we never had the time or chance to fully sort out the storage and layout of all the things on-board and the boat show provided an excellent opportunity to do so.

We decided to store most of the on-board equipment into plastic crates and containers with fitted lids, we now have containers for spares, food, cleaning supplies and general goods. The Knysna 500SE has a huge amount of storage space with two large forepeaks and two large stern lockers. We have maximised the storage space but in order to find out where everything was we needed to type up an inventory of every item on Catching Up. This process was a huge job, we would start with one hull, unpack every item into the saloon then proceed to clean each cupboard, locker and storage location removing any fibreglass dust and dirt that was left over from her construction. We repacked items into locations suitable for the stability and waterline of the vessel. We decided to start with the port side as Catching Up has a large weight distribution on her starboard side with a full household washing machine located in the Starboard Forepeak. To account for the weight imbalance we decided that all our spare tools and parts would all be located in the port forepeak. We systematically moved through the entire yacht storing similar things together in the same area.

Catching Up was clean when she was handed over, although being a newly built boat and underway a thin layer of fibreglass dust would fall on everything and would irritate your skin causing an itchy, very sore type of rash. We moved on to do a few other jobs that we wanted to sort out – we switched our mooring lines for a thicker gauge, which required whipping and fairing up on each end, we taped all turnbuckles, spliced on new fender lines and secured all spare boxes in the forepeaks with strapping. These tasks took days to complete, as they were labour intensive. Andre, our sailing instructor was the one who led the charge. The amount of education that came from doing such tasks was immense. Going into this adventure, I never thought I’d ever have such fantastic exposure to whipping and fairing up lines with a needle and twine and also having a crash course in splicing of lines.

Once all the work on the to do list was done, there was no time to spare as we started our 11 day STCW Course.