Sunday. A day of rest my ar$e...

With the oil reservoir removed I have given it a bit of a rub down and wire brush, applied Vactan to areas of rust or plain steel and allowed it to go off overnight. Today one of the sides was painted, ironically in British racing green... There was an original off blue-ish sort of colour which would have been the colour it was first painted, but finding this could have been a long and time consuming task, time which is better spent elsewhere.

Today was spent back on the barge moving the ballast around to get at the remainder of the bilge. Another back breaker of a day either spent moving bricks and bags of sand or on my hands and knees scraping the rust and crud off the bottom of the bilge. Most areas seemed to be fine, but there were 2 or 3 areas of serious corrosion which will probably need replating.

It reminds me of one of those games you used to have as a kid with a 4x4 square with 15 sliding square tiles and you had to slide the tiles around to make a picture, only this one is much bigger and you are sliding the ballast around to make a work space. It's tiring and somewhat fruitless, but there is very little other option.

The fore end is going to be an even bigger pain to get access to the bilge as it is jammed pretty tight with steel and concrete blocks. I suspect I will have to do some more shifting and junking of the trivia and useless items as room seems to be at a premium at the moment. I will try to get rid of the old grey water tank by the stairs this week and hopefully get access to the bilge closest to the stairs. Since this had the water tank and bathroom over it I suspect this will be in poor condition. Certainly the little I have seen around the sea cock is not in great condition and suspect, again, more plating will be required.

Tomorrow I have plans to take the rust and crud from the bilge to the dump and then refill them with that which I have scraped off today. Sisyphus had it easy I tells ya...