Shrimper corner

This entry is not fishing related in any way. Instead it concerns our small sailing boat which was designed and built in deepest Cornwall (she is a Cornish Shrimper; there's a clue there). She is called Eun na Mara which is Gaelic for 'bird of the sea'. Given her origin it is hardly surprising that there are very few sailing in Scottish waters. Tarbert marina had just the one, ours, until a few months ago when suddenly a second one appeared, as if by magic.

She is a little younger than ours, has a black hull, is moored close by and is called Loup.

As soon as we spotted her we were keen to make contact with the owners so we could exchange shrimpy tales, discover our boats' little differences and examine the modifications, these things all being important to a Shrimper owner. It turns out, however, that we share far more than an identical boat with Loup's owners as not only do they reside in our village but they have recently moved into a house on our street just a few doors away from us. Stranger still is the fact that their house is of the same size and construction as ours and their garden, well it makes ours look quite tame by comparison. They have a jungle to cope with and will be facing similar problems to those we had when we first moved in.

The Shrimper is a boat designed for two people to sail and even sleep in overnight but now that ours is so conveniently berthed within sight of our house I have been tempted to take her out on my own from time to time. I have taken for granted her various foibles and also the inevitable consequences of having a gaff rig - not able to compete with a more modern Bermudan rigged boat when sailing upwind. It was only after comparing notes with the owners of our companion boat, however, that I realised something more serious might be affecting Eun na Mara's sailing performance. Shrimpers have a heavy iron keel plate which, when lowered from within the boat, adds a stronger righting moment as well as resisting leeway when sailing to windward. [If this is starting to get too technical then please feel free to jump ahead or else take a short walk and come back later.] When raised the plate is contained within a watertight box inside the boat where it is supported by a pivot bolt so the rear part can be lowered on a wire. The problem with ours is that the plate gets stuck before it is fully lowered, something we only discovered from experiments on Loup, whose keel plate works as it should. 

It is a well known fact in sailing circles that observing what is actually happening beneath one's boat is not easy (it is a hidden world) so this rather uninteresting picture, taken with a waterproof camera fastened to the end of a selfie stick, is something to be treasured. What it shows in essence is that our boat has a problem as only a small fraction of the keel plate is showing beneath the hull.

This is what it should look like when fully lowered.

In order to try to fix the problem we thought it might be possible to dive beneath the boat, give keel plate a tug from underneath to encourage it to drop down, then bob back up to the surface before running out of air. This became Plan A. Wet-suited, I clamber over the side of the boat and slide underneath to grab hold of the small protruding piece of iron. Now upside down, my feet braced against the bottom of the hull, I heave away with all my strength but nothing moves. I soon realise that this is something that can only be fixed with the boat out of the water so I focus on the bobbing up bit but emerge from under the water looking like a zombie as I'm covered in blue antifouling paint, the self eroding hull coating having transferred itself to me as I slithered about down below.

Plan B. Arrangements are made with another local boatyard for our boat to be hoisted into the air (not her natural element) so the faulty keel can be extracted (it only comes out from beneath) and the problem fixed. The journey to the boatyard, however, is necessarily by road since the Crinan Canal which connects us with the other yard is closed for maintenance during the winter months. This means we must first get the boat back onto her trailer, the one that spent last summer languishing in our garage whilst new suspension units were fitted, so we take advantage of the crane organised as part of our marina's end of season boat liftout, which solved that problem. But once secured safely on her trailer it turns out things are a little more complicated because a massive rain storm passing over Scotland several weeks before had caused landslips in several places, the largest of which had completely blocked the road between our home and the boatyard we were planning to drive to. Alternative routes would all involve a lengthy detour along narrow single track roads, totally unsuitable when pulling a loaded trailer. So plan B is on hold.

Over the following weeks, road repair crews begin to remove thousands of tons of rock and rubble from the blocked road. Simultaneously an alternative route is constructed which bypasses the mountain from which the rockfall came by using an existing forest track, previously only used for extracting timber, and an additional piece of land bought from a local farmer. Remarkably, quicker than anyone had expected, the new road, which is far enough from the original rockfall to be safe from further unstable debris above the main road, was announced as being open to traffic, albeit with a one way traffic flow in place. But now something else intervened... Christmas. The boatyard workshop staff are given a two week break so our trip is on hold until the new year.

Finally the day arrives when we hitch up the trailer, slide under the height bar which protects the marina car park from vehicles only slightly higher than ours, and drive north.

Everything goes smoothly and on arrival at the boatyard Eun na Mara is lifted into the air so we can see what is going on with the keel. Once the inevitable layers of barnacles and worm casts are pressure-washed off the problem becomes apparent. From inside and from underneath the boat some distortion to the side of the keel box can be seen and it is this that is preventing the keel from dropping. Fixing this is not going to be an easy job and the busy boatyard cannot begin work for some months yet so once again we must wait.

How did this damage happen? The answer to this question lies with the internal ballast used in the construction of these boats; small pieces of iron (shot) bonded into the floor on either side of the keel box. At some point long ago seawater has got into this on one side and caused the iron to rust. This in turn caused the ballast to swell which then put pressure on the side of the keel box, distorting it until the keel plate could no longer swing down. The solution now is to chip away the swollen internal ballast (not easy) so the keel box side can be forced back into shape and fixed in this position. I am able to do some of the work by chipping and grinding away from inside but the final repair will require access from underneath the boat, which is impossible whilst she sits on her trailer. Hence we still need the services of the boatyard and must be patient. We tow her back home and wait for the call from the yard.

A few weeks later we are watching enviously as the boats in our local marina are craned back into the water so they can go off sailing.