CAT | Rebuild
OK. So we’ve had Lady Stardust for 3 years and she’s gradually deteriorating despite all my best efforts. After one of the worst summers I can ever remember (2008) in which we hardly visited her because it didn’t stop raining we finally emerged from hibernation in March 2009 and decided that something had to be done and that I wasn’t the man to do it (not by myself, anyway).
Well, perhaps I’m being a bit hard on myself. However, it was becoming clear that I didn’t have either the time or sufficiently specialist knowledge to handle all the things that needed to be sorted out on the boat.
I’d noticed the previous year that the roof was in a bit of a state, so I laid some new sheets of plywood over the roof and sealed them in. Only 6 months later my repair was looking distinctly tatty. For a start, there was a ridge running down the middle of the roof from bow to stern that trapped the water at the rear, as a consequence of which the wooden trim on the roof at the stern was softer than soap. It needed to be cut out, and I wasn’t quite sure how to do it. In addition to this there were spots on the rear deck at either side that we couldn’t stand on because the plywood beneath the mahogany planks had rotted through, meaning that the planks were floating unsupported above free space.
