Achilles 24

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With the reservoir of water now gone another attempt was made to fill the keel. This time after a few days two bubbles formed and when I cut into them rusty water weeped out.

For some time I had been thinking that the only way to properly sort this out was to drop the keel. Obviously that was not something I really wanted to tackle, but advice from a surveyor confirmed that it was the thing to do.

Zethar was moved into 'The Tent' by a very clever fully adjustable trailer best described as a giant tuning fork with wheels at the 'prongs' ends and a tractor at the other.

With blocks under the keel, the keel to hull join was ground all the way around and the keel bolts removed. She was lifted to see if the keel would drop off but of course not, so she was lifted higher by the trailer and shored up. To take her weight we used a drum forward and two drums with a railway sleeper across aft, plus blocks on top of the sleeper under the quarters and props under the bilges, and that was how she stayed suspended while the keel was off.

The nine inch blocks seen under the keel below were replaced with four two inch pads each end and wedges, so that we could drop the keel away from the boat by levering it up and removing a pad at a time alternately forward and aft until it sat on the floor on two inch pads. This saved having to get the trailer back again to raise the hull off the keel.

We started cutting the sealer in the keel join with fine toothed hacksaw blades. We cut in about 10 inches forward and 12 inches aft until we got towards where the grp keel stub was touching the cast iron leaving no more room to cut. Softwood wedges were tried but their tips only squashed until they split. Luckily we found some hardwood offcuts piled in the corner of the tent and were able to make new wedges. Armed with them and a 7lb sledgehammer the removal became easy. The sealer holding the keel began to split until it had cracked along half the keel which had dropped about 1/4 of an inch (6mm) at the forward end. In the stress and excitement of doing the job I had forgotten to use the camera and as I belatedly knelt to take a photo the join crackled gently and the keel dropped half an inch onto its waiting blocks.