Painting the Barge

Just in case Dad ever tries to get out of the decorating by pleading that he doesn't like painting and is off to work on the barge instead, look at this little lot! With the hull of the famous sailing barge Cambria now almost complete, the volunteers have turned their attentions away from the PR duties of showing the public round the old girl, to slapping 7 coats of various paints onto the hull - all 91 feet long by 7 feet tall by 23 feet across-the-bottom of her.

A gang of 4-6 volunteers can do one coat in 2 sessions. The paint is applied using those narrow (4 inch?) rollers on the longer (2 foot?) handles, this being Master Shipwright Tim Goldsack's instructed method of choice to waste less paint and give a good finish. The undercoats alternate between 2 shades - both do the same job but it's easier to see where you've been if you don't use the same colour, so we the guys swap between a flat 'battleship grey' and what Dulux might have called a 'grey-with-a-hint-of-pink' which has now become fixed in the volunteers' heads as 'Rosy Glow'. Today there are a crowd of 6 of them down at the barge, which is enough to do one side and most of the bottom in a couple of hours.

Then Dad's back up here and tidying in the garden, picking up the rest of the hedge clippings remaining from 2CV Llew's trimming, chain-saw activities and raking up Paulownia leaves to reveal the fresh yellow-green points of snowdrops just emerging from the soil under the apple trees.

We get a nice walk through Cemetery and Rec, where a whole gang of us meet up by chance for the humans to chat while we mill about - 4 red and white Springers (DK, LB, Pip and Alfie), a German Shepherd (Bazz), 2 Jack Russells (Patch and a red and white we don't know the name of) and of course Haggis and I. Doggie chaos!

Deefs