Midnight Star’s BSS certificate was valid until January 2022, and there was one item that worried me – the state of the Gas Locker. Glen had be honest about it’s condition, saying it would probably need a bit of work, and I’d also been advised that our particular design of boat was prone to trapping water in the lockers and causing them to rust.
I was also advised that as long as there were no perforations that could allow leaking gas to get into the bilges, cleaning up loose rust, using a rust curer such as Kurust or Jenolite and then painting the lockers with a bitumen based paint should be sufficient to pass the test as long as it sounded solit when hit with a hammer!. Sadly for me, in the process of chiping out the loose rust I discovered a couple of small but significant holes along the front edge of the floor of the locker. The tempting thing was to fill these, but all I would be doing was giving myself anxiety that the bodge would either fall apart within. a few months or be detected when the boat was being tested.
Fortunatley, one of the residential moorers at Circus Field Basin is a fully qualified welder, and as the gas locker is well above the waterline, Michael was able to undertake the work require without removing the boat from the water. Just after Christmas he examined the locker area, used a needle gun to clean up the rusty areas, and welded a very substantial steel strip over the dodgy area. It’s not going to rust through there in my lifetime!
I needed to treat the locker with Kurust and then I applied a coat of lead oxide paint. I would fully repaint the locker once we had taken the boat to Baxters, but now we were in a good place to apply for the Safety Certificate. Before Roger Alsop made his visit, I fitted an extra battery isolation switch to the buffer battery in bilge, and refixed the bubble tester in the locker with screws into newly tapped holes rather than the No More Nails that should have been doing the job.
One the day of the test, Roger turned up a bit early, and discussed the boat in detail. He was obviously familiar with the design of the Canaltime boats, inspected everything he should without asking me to rip out any panels, and we had a very plesant chat about his own boat and his liking for The Boat pub in Berko, just down the road from our house. Then the certificate was created online and submitted to the CRT – it all happened so quickly I wasn’t immediatly aware that the our boat had passed without any issues. At this point, Midnight Star was renamed the N.B. Jac!