To our enthralled reader who may have been pining for a blog post from us these past 2 and a half years, a lot has been going on with Heydays, but not a lot of sailing!

It all started with a visit to the Green Boat Show in Plymouth in 2022. We had been concerned for some time that although our dear old Heydays is a sailing boat, we were sadly spewing toxins into the sea each year though our antifoul paint. At the show, among all the electric outboards and various generators we came across a product called Finsulate which (according to the very charming sales person) would completely remove the need to antifoul each year as all we needed to do was to stick what looked suspiciously like velour onto the bottom and weeds and barnacles and other assorted flora and fauna would find it impossible to get a toehold (or whatever they possess) to slow us down.

Always keen to try things which seem too good to be true, we went ahead and had carpet (as some sceptics unkindly remarked) stuck to our newly sanded and epoxied hull.

We set of for some mini cruising along the Solent, thinking that we were maybe a bit more sluggish than usual, but feeling pretty smug about how we were single handedly saving the planet. It was only when we saw that we were being overtaken by an old lady strolling on the shore that we realised that maybe we had something dragging us back.

Ever one for convincing ourselves of the opposite, despite the clear facts, we struggled on for a couple of months getting slower and slower until we finally decided to dry her out on the slipway at Lymington.

Now, the original ‘blurb’ suggested that any growth which did appear, could easily be removed by a gentle scrape. It was a warm and sunny late August. Onlookers, in between licking ice-creams or sipping beers, enquired why we had a garden on the bottom of our boat. They were further encouraged when, having failed with light scraping, we took a garden hoe to the jungle we had been lugging around the high seas.

After 2 hours of back breaking, muddy and completely futile work, we gave up and resolved there and then to have it removed. The UK arm of the company by this time had stopped trading and the Dutch company stopped taking our calls or even responding to emails. In the end the Dutch small claims court ruled that the parent company could not be held liable for the product failures as we bought it form a (now defunct) UK company! Never mind we thought, the product info says that it can be removed by hot air or steam. At this point one of the directors of the UK company got involved and to be fair organised some help. Several weekends of hard work finally got the outer layer off, but left a sticky residue which no amount of legal or even illegal solvents would remove (John was a chemistry teacher and even he was defeated by this!!!).

The solution was a complete sandblast, re-epoxy and finally a coat of copper coat which is a tried and trusted reasonably green alternative to traditional antifouls.

Heydays, stripped of her carpet and garden and re launched found a new lease of life and we positively skipped across the waves back to Lymington.

At the time of writing, we are planning our 10^th anniversary cruise around the British Isles, hoping to get to some of the places we missed before or where we definitely want to spend more time. As before, we will take it in easy hops and leave the boat from time to time to come home for family, grandchildren etc. Over-winter at the moment is planned to be Northern Ireland, but plans change….,

….and we keep being reminded that both us and the boat were 10 years younger on the last circular jaunt!