2017 started with a series of storm surges down the east coast of England. We thought that storm surges would be a rare event coming every few years but they seem to come quite often starting on Boxing day and continuing into January.

In May we left Woodbridge to go to dry dock in Maylandsea, river Blackwater in Essex. It wasn’t so far to go but it took 3 days as we had to use the tides, HW to leave our berth, HW the next day to exit the Deben and finally the flood tide from LW to go West along the coast to the river Blackwater. That was the fun part and then followed the hard work that is dry dock :-(.

The dry dock was expensive and drastic as we had the whole hull grit blasted back to bare steel/iron, repaired and then layered up with Hempel 2 pack paint system. It was a good result though and we returned to Woodbridge looking great, even if coming into the River Deben was a bit scary with a small beam sea that really set us rolling! The paint should resist the harsh salt water environment of our drying berth and can then be washed and recoated at our next dry docking in 3 to 7 years time (depends on how the anodes go).

By July we were back in our berth in Woodbridge and enjoying some local sailing, both in our new day boat, ‘Lola’ and in the borrowed sailing dinghies from the ‘Deben Yacht Club’.