Viewers to our channel probably think we are mad, well with a title of "A beak-extension can keep you afloat" then I think the word probably has just been removed. so we now have "Viewers to our channel think we are mad". Of course they are right, but a little bit of madness keeps us sane.

Engine cover

We have been doing a lot here on Salty Lass, lots of little jobs that just cleared the decks and got Salty Lass in tip top condition, on top of that I was asked to make an outboard engine cover for a fellow yachtie and the only fabric I had was some spare fabric from when I made Prudence her Fish TV. It was an incredibly simple design with the sides of the cover just being one continuos piece of fabric joined together and the top being formed by just stitching the two sides together so that formed a bag. The only shaping that was needed was in the fact that the top stitching was in a dome shape rather than a straight line. Once completer, I sprayed it with a water repellent and added a Velcro strap to secure the cover over the outboard engine. With the Velcro strap I used a top tip from a fellow yachtie called Colin in that he said leave a good length of strap free of Velcro so that you can use a gloved hand to rip the Velcro apart.

Steps

A couple of weeks ago a fellow yachtie gave us two bits of wood so that we could improve our engine access, so we decided that while we were in a marina, we would use these to sort out our steps. One of the jobs that I was dreading was removing the rubber inlays, but that if fact turned out to be very simple because all I needed to do was pull the rubber out very gently. The two bits of wood were not quite the right size because if we put them in as they are, then the bottom step would wobble, so Beverley cut out the thinnest piece of wood out of them, to account for the side sections of the companion way steps. I have to say that our power tools made short work of that and soon we very ready to start varnishing. We varnished in the morning for three days straight so that the fumes left the boat during the day, this meant that we had to crawl in and out using the front hatch. We decided that we would leave the last coat of varnish to dry for three days which is why the side pieces were not fitted when the video was sorted out.

Other wee jobs

Other wee jobs that we did were

• Adding new clips to our mooring rope, these cost a £1 per rope and we use this to catch a cleat. Once on the cleat we pull ourselves to a stop using the winch
• Fitting our joker valve to the manual bilge pump. Prudence thought the joker valve was a beak extension, which was very funny, but once Beverley got it back it was just a case of fitting it and testing it, which meant that we had to pore water into the bilge, but I'm glad to say it all worked. While we were testing the manual bilge we tested our electric bilge pump as well.
• Adding CT1 to the bilge to secure the the diaphragm, we needed to do this because when I tried the manual bilge pump, I just yanked it all out, so adding the CT1 in a few places just made sure that didn't happen again.
• Creating a new snubber hook - For this I had to watch my own instructional video on how to do a three braid splice but I managed to do it, so my instructional video can't be that bad. The new snubber hook has a gate, so regardless of how bouncy the waves get, then the snubber hook will not come off