Two Months of Maintenance in Cygnet

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January, February, March 2020

After three months of constant travel it was time to give Allagai a little well deserved maintenance and take a break from cruising. We had already started a few of the jobs in Hobart but Cygnet seemed the perfect spot to stop for a couple of weeks and finish them. We also had a friend, Piet, that lived in town and were quite to keen to catch-up with him while we were in the area. Little did we know that this would lead to starting a job we had been avoiding since the big 2018 refit. In 2018 we had stripped all the lining off the hull and had since left the walls bare steel while we waited for the perfect timber to line the hull. To our complete surprise Piet just so happened to have exactly what we’d been looking for. Piet generously gave us about 150 Tasmanian Oak tung and groove panels and the shed space to clean them up. We were and still are eternally grateful for his generosity, the panels were second hand from an old building and leftover from a job and so not needed by him. All we had to do was remove the old house paint and add them to Allagai and we would have beautiful timber panelling on the hull.

This led to a flurry of activity because fitting the new panelling wasn’t going to be an easy task. First we had to remove all the portholes to remove the old jagged timber we had ripped off in the 2018 refit. Once the portholes were removed we then had to chip rust, paint and replace the timber spacing before reinstalling the portholes. This was a huge task and left giant gaping holes in the boat for a couple of days each time and so could only be done with the perfect weather. However after about three weeks we managed to get all the portholes removed and refitted and already Allagai was looking smarter.

The next task was to add the timber panelling which again wasn’t a walk in the park. Through this experience we realised that nothing on Allagai was straight and she has no right angles. Every single tung and groove panel had to be individually cut to size with an unique angle to where it met the hull and pre-exiting walls and cupboards. However we couldn’t really complain as to get something on the hull to cover up the bare steel was well worth the effort.

While in Cygnet we didn’t only play with the hull and panelling but also completed a few other necessary jobs. We also fixed and re-varnished the companionway because we had broken a piece of the timber off on the way down. While we were at it the stairs down into the boat also got a well deserved coat of varnish along with the dorey boxes which had started leaking. We also finished off a job we started a few weeks ago in the cockpit. Before Hugos family had arrived we had repainted the cockpit but hadn’t got around to the final coat on the floor because we wanted to try something different. Our current deck paint system just wasn’t holding up to such continual use while cruising so we had decided to change deck paint to Kiwi Grip. But before applying it to the whole deck we decided to make the cockpit floor the test section.

Our time in Cygnet definitely wasn’t spent idle but after nearly six weeks we were ready to move on. We hadn’t quite finished panelling the whole boat but with all the timber cleaned up and stored on board we figured we could continue it anywhere later. The main sections had been completed including the whole main area of the boat and bedroom. All that was left was the bathroom, work bench and the aft cabin/ storage area. We decided our next goal was to travel all the way up the navigable part of the Huon River to Huonville where we could do a huge Woolworths resupply before exploring the rest of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

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