Wind Horse is wedged into her winter storage position at Berthon’s in Lymington, UK. The yard is very full of boats, and we are rather long to be going around tight corners.

Yet the haul out crew did a masterful job, with nary a scratch. Note the sign in the background.

How is this for a wireless remote. Bet this chap has no problem with his TV remote control.

Our bottom paint is working well. It has not been touched since April and for the past two months we have done a lot of sitting. This is the transom, a dead water area which does not self polish underway, so the dirtiest part of the hull. A small amount of grass just at the waterline.

Middle of the waterline and maybe an inch (25mm) band of grass.

This week there is a huge art fair in London, with 60,000 folks coming to browse and attend the various events. We were thinking of exhibiting one of our stabilizers. We are not sure who or what created this design, but it is very cool.

A quick wash with the high pressure hose has us nice and clean.

Considering the 11,000+ miles since California there are just a few dings. This on the stabilizer may have been caused by a piece of driftwood, or more likely ice.

The bow shows a touch of paint damage, just a tiny portion of which is through the undercoat.

You will recall that we coated the props with "Prop Shield". It seems to be working. There is no scale or barnacle growth. Just some grass which would probably have self-polished if we were underway for a day.

Sorry about the out of focus photo. These are the hydraulic gauges showing the weight. 20 tons on the forward set of straps and just under 25 tons aft. With full fuel and a few hundred gallons of water this is within a couple of points of what the gauges should read (they are normally off quite a lot).

Finally, one of the four teardrop shaped zincs on the canoe body. These are now 3.5 years old (40,000 miles) and they are maybe half way through their life cycle. That’s an indication that the zincs are working well with the paint system and that there are no electrical problems.

For comparison photos from the last haul out see https://setsail.com/s_logs/dashew/dashew447.html .

A note on maintenance costs for cruisers headed this way. We were told to expect much higher prices for everything in the UK. So far, this has not been the case compared to the US. Hauling, storage, and hourly rates for the yard crew are comparable to an efficient boat yard in the States. We don’t know about productivity yet, but watching the way the guys in the yard move around it appears they don’t waste much time. We have pulled our three raw water pumps off the diesels to have them rebuilt (they are fine now, but with 1000 hours on the engine pumps it makes sense to do seals and bearings now). We are going to have the dings in the bottom paint recoated and the salon table varnished (it never got its final coats when originally built). That’s it… not much of a list after all these miles. We’ll report next spring how things have turned out.

Wind Horse shall spend the winter in Lymington while her crew repairs to the desert. We’ve got lots to catch up with on land after seven eventful months of cruising.