…even though we just passed the official celestial start of spring. This winter was long and cold in New-England, temperatures inside the shop felt below 40 deg this winter as we don’t use heat in respect for all the classic wooden boats staying with us it was cold inside… So with temperatures that low any painting, varnishing and other use of curable materials was pretty much out of the question, but we are now catching up big time.

LUCIE is on the top of our schedule right now as she will be the first to leave the shop this spring. In three weeks from now – mid of April – she will be hauled to New York to start her journey to la Trinité Sur Mer in France for the 2016 World Championship for 6 Metres.

LUCIE got her first coat of topsite paint on two weeks ago and is waiting for the ideal weather and schedule window to get the final topsite paint works. While we are waiting for this the bottom got a fresh polishing – the underside of the ballast was already done in the fall but now the rest got caught up – well, that is minus the rudder… The rudder is currently off the boat! Long term readers of this blog will remember that we built this rudder in the spring 2012 and it has performed very well. Now it was time to take another look at it, slim it down a bit and further improve on the hydrodynamics of its shape. So we were pretty happy about the way we had designed the rudder blade to stock connection as this system allows us to take the blade off without messing with gudgeons, pintles and rudder stock alignment. All trim and shaping of the rudder is done, it is now heading to be covered and sealed again and should be back on the boat at the end of first week April.

There also is some work going on around the rig. The boom underwent another minor diet and lost some of its hardware which was not being used anymore. The mast is getting an upgrade on the halyard sheaves and a better system to trim the checkstays. And we have a new mast step in the making which will improve LUCIE’s rake tuning abilities.

And there is a new spinnaker pole in town (or on board…)! This is the third pole that LUCIE got and we have not yet broken any of the previous ones. This new pole is slightly bigger in diameter than the small one we mainly used the last few seasons – and it has bigger clews on it to make life on the foredeck a breeze. But the real feature of this new pole is that is was built like a spar – hollow and birdsmouthed; it has the same light weight as our trusted “light breeze” pole but due to its construction like a real spar it is 75% stiffer… And numerous coats of varnish later made it look pretty cool as well.Stay tuned for updates on the preparations for the trip to France, the french country house we rented, schedules etc…

Jens