Miley’s New Nose

So there we have it. We’ll have to start having showers again; Miley can smell things, she has a new nose.

I’m not going to write a lot for this post, because the picture says it all, but I’ll give you a quick overview of our bowsprit project.

We discovered that Milestone’s bowsprit was totally rotten waaaaaay back in October, and ever since, James’ friend Al Jones has been lovingly crafting Miley her brand spanking new nose from some Douglas Fir we sourced from Travis Perkins. James’ parents offered to cover the cost of the new bowsprit for our Christmas present, so we are very grateful for that.

It’s taken a long time and has thrown lots of little challenges at us.

Unfortunately our windlass is mounted on top of the bowsprit so it was destroyed when we took the old bowsprit off. Well, it was already pretty much detroyed; the front of the casing had corroded and it was only standing on its rear mounts, which had corroded to the mounting screws so James literally had to saw the mounts off to remove it from the deck. So that’s x1 new windlass on the shopping list……. gulp. I’ll write a separate post about that one!

Finally we got to the stage where we were ready to varnish our new bowsprit - or Bowie as I’ve been calling it (names are very important). Of course, with every step forward, we seemed to come across another little hiccup - we’d forgotten to round off the edges, which needed to be done before we varnished it, so we had to wait until James was next off work to take Bowie back up to Northampton, where Al lives, so he could round the edges off. Wow, it looked good.

So now we were ready to varnish! Hang on… varnishing… England… cold weather… well, that was never going to dry on the deck, and we live aboard so it’s not like we have a heated spare room. Not to worry; James soon sorted out a heated office that we could use (thanks Ted!).

Nine lovely coats of Epifanes later, we arranged a date with Al to come down and Sikaflex that beauty onto Miley’s foredeck. Two tubes of Sikaflex later…

Miley's new bowsprit

Bit better than this, no?

Miley's old bowsprit

A million thanks to Al, and James’ parents.

Three cheers for Miley’s new nose!