Update on our 'Helling Beurt'

It's Thursday already, and the time is flying by. We are working very hard, but not to the extent that we are spending all evening on the Luxor. Frits, who has been helping Koos, has been doing a fantastic job of welding patches where required. The photo above shows him and Koos preparing a template for the piece of steel that needed to be cut. They are using cardboard as it is nicely flexible. You can see more by clicking on the image. There's still some water in the bottom of the ship, and this seems to have been coming from some leaking rivets. They are quite bad, so instead of just welding them up (which is normal practice), Frits is putting steel 'sticking plasters' over pairs of them.



For my part, I have been official water pumper outer, painter of bottoms, and boeisel renovator. 'Boeisel' is one of those words I don't know in English, but it is the part that is painted red around the top of the hull. I've been using a steel brush attached to an angle grinder to remove the rust and old paint, and have a war wound to show for it...well, a tiny one. A piece of rust flew up and hit me hard on my nose today, making it bleed with a profusion out of proportion with the minute cut that it was. Luckily I've been wearing goggles or it might have been my eye instead, which wouldn't have been pleasant!

In between jobs I've also been taking photos for the record. The one above is nothing to do with the harbour, I know, but it's a brand new block of flats that has just been completed in our neighbouring Wijnhaven. I thought it looked quite impressive, so I took a photo of it from the slipway. I've also taken a number of photos of the Luxor from various angles, and also of the harbour from the decks of the Luxor, so if you'd like to see the ones I've put here in more detail, you know you're just a click away!



Tomorrow there will be more painting to do, and then I hope we can nip down to the little house over the weekend. We will then be ready to go back in the water on Monday.