Crystal Sea Trawling Blog

The boat arrived back into Newlyn late tuesday afternoon after a six day trip to the southwest of the scillies. We landed our catch into the lorry for sale on the wednesday's market at Plymouth.

This was the last landing for nearly 3 weeks as we were due up to Tom's boatyard on the Friday morning for our annual refit and paint up, but before we headed up to Polruan we had a lot to do to get the boat ready.

We had to take the nets off and put them on the quay to be repaired, then we gave the boat a really good clean and we had to jet spray all the surfaces off, ready for painting. This took most of wednesday and thursday to do, but by thursday afternoon we were ready so we went home for tea, then came back in to leave in the early hours to catch the tide right to head around the lizard.

We had a good steam up it was flat calm all the way and we headed through the narrow entrance of the river Fowey at 0800hrs at tied up alongside the pontoon just outside the boatyard. Fowey is a very attractive place and it is always a pleasure to visit, even though we have to paint the boat for 2weeks, I can think of worse places to work.

First aboard was the electricion flossy, he had come to fit a 240volt imersion instead of our 110volt one so we could plug into the yard and have a shower after a long days painting.

Alan and Paul Toms came aboard about 1630hrs and said they were ready to put us up on the slip, so with that we got ready, put the boat in the cradle and up we went

 It took a good hour to get the boat in the right position in the cradle and up to the top of the slip, its important to got this right as the crystal weighs over 250 tonnes deadweight so you don't want anything to go wrong.

Omce up the slip we got the yards very powerfull jet sprayer and set about blasting off the weed. The crstal sea that you usually see is only half of the boat she has a fair bit under the water, drawing 4.3meters at the stern so we also had to use the cherry picker to reach the highest parts of the hull.