Easter Sunday and Barnacled Propellors...

The Easter bunny managed to find his way to us on Lucey Blue, which I thought was rather industrious of him. The kids woke to find some bunnies on the saloon table, and little eggs hidden about the boat. It was fun lying in bed listening to them shrieking about having found eggs here and there.


Against my better judgement we allowed them to start on their bunnies.


Can you say S . U . G . A . R . ?




This is a pic of our youngest later that afternoon...I was going to try and Photoshop in an Easter egg instead of the mandarin...but didn't....you get my drift at any rate...

After we'd got ourselves all together, we decided we'd take Lucey Blue out for a spin. Being without a main....it was just going to be a leisurely motor. We turned on the engines, unsheathed the instruments (except for the chart plotter which wasn't there), returned our tray tables to the upright position and prepared for take-off. Once Nick had taken us off the mooring I gently eased the engines forward and steered us out. I didn't notice anything at first but as I eased the revs up there was an awful lot of shuddering and shaking goin' on. As we watched everything in the cockpit visibly bouncing around we agreed that we should return to the mooring poste haste!

Nick decided that a survey of the propellors was in order, and promptly went in search of his wetsuit (it not being that warm in Sydney Harbour in April). When he eventually went in...this is what he found...


...two months worth of barnacles had made their home on our propellors...


...and a cute little fishy (but we are fairly confident that the fish did not have anything to do with the shuddering and shaking!).

So Nick went about scraping them all off. While he was down there he noticed that part of the rubber fitting around the sail drive leg had come off.


He was very pleased about having discovered this because it explained the presence of some water that he had found in the engine locker...and is easily fixed (next time we haul out).

With the propellors all de-barnacled...we were finally able to set of on our leisurely motor cruise. More about that later!

:-)
Sam.