A winter project

Now’s a great time to start a refurbishment

- Marsali Taylor

Sometimes, on an autumn day too wild to go sailing, you take a notion to clear out the garage.

I had an ulterior motive. Writing about my adventures in my trusty roll-deck Graduate dinghy, Lady Blue, reminded me what fun I’d had with her. I hadn’t sailed her since my cancer operations, but I reckoned I was officially better now. It was time to get her out of her eight-year sitting in sheds.

The other reason she’d been sitting idle was because her mast needed work. I’d finally got round to talking to our local boatbuilder about it. The Shetland wind rattling her stays when she sat down at the pier all summer had loosened the screws and rotted the wood around the hounds. I hoped he could perhaps cut out the old wood and plug it with new. ‘Maybe’ he’d said, peering up at a very dusty mast tied up in the roof of the shed. ‘If you can get it out, I’ll see what I can do.’