I see a dry dock and I want to paint it black

Two and a bit years have passed since the last mammoth effort of stripping the hull back to bare metal and sorting out a loppy looking bottom.

it took three weeks of very very hard work back in March 2007.
[url="http://www.canalworld.net/forums/blog/honey_ryder/index.php?showentry=124"]first Hull service part 1[/url]
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Ive been holding back from booking the drydock for fear of the hard work to come, but there is only so long you can do that before you really do have to get your finger out and actually do something.
So, a few calls later and I was booked into the dock at Uxbridge boat centre. It was here we bought all our blacking from last time and since they have always been so friendly and accommodating I figured it was worth the slog across London to get there.
We had just one weekend to move from Cheshunt to Uxbridge. It's a fairly long way I can tell you. We shuffled a bit mid week down to the marina near Rammey Marsh and then commenced the trip early on saturday morning. it was weedy, weedy weedy, plastic baggy, plastic baggy, weedy, plastic baggy, weedy, plastic baggy all the way.
at least 10 trips down the weed hatch as we seemed to snag every thing going. It came to be a routine that at nearly every lock, engine off, check the propellor.

We managed to time it so that at the last lock we were forced into enduring the hammering hale storm and rain, mid-lock. It was quite a refreshing change from the intense heat so I didnt mind putting my sun parasol up to fend off the golf ball sized pieces of ice. We arrived at Angel for the night and continued the next day.

We arrived at West Drayton late afternoon early evening on Sunday after a good run through london and a box of noodles from Camden. I highly recommend going through Camden locks in the morning, it's so peaceful and there's still time to have a quick stop off and shop/eat before it gets busy. Camden is one of my favourite places, but in the past five years has changed dramatically, not necessarily for the better but the march of progress doesnt suffer nostalgia, it only sees pound signs.

a few days later we were being hauled into the dry dock alongside another boat.

It took ages to empty, from 9am through til at least 2pm and it wasnt until 3.30pm that we got the use of the pressure washer. We had images of what it was like the last time and we were worried about the tight working window of just a few days in the dock.
We needn't have worried, within 24 hours we had the entire hull pressure washed, wire brushed/angle ground, the first coat of black on and by the end of the second day, we were pretty much there with the second coat.
talk about a bloody doddle and a piece of piss!

Except for the lights.

we've been working in the dark, straining our eyes, not understanding why the lights dont want to work. It's all very well being under cover, but without lights, painting black on black, it's not been easy.
It took nearly 4 days for me to work out the lights were on a timer and the timer was set wrong.... DOH! last night, I had a moment of frustration, staring into the electrical cupboard when it finally dawned on me and then we had light... HURRAY!
and then we could see the paint runs... SHIT.
So we've been back round the boat removing all the run blobs and tidying up the blacking.

Otherwise, I couldnt have asked for an easier job.

Total cost:
Dry dock £280 for the week
4 tins of paint £100
one day use of pressure washer £56
Paint brushes and rollers (from Tesco) £5

totals £441