Wood is a beautiful material that gives character, class, and beauty to your yacht; but the marine environment is anything but forgiving! Wood on a yacht is prone to rotting as it is exposed to fierce sun, moisture, salt, and grime.
Linseed Oil will help protect your wood from rot and keep it looking beautiful!
Our journey inland takes us further from the boat as we leave Spain and enter a new country on our journey East as temperatures continue to drop in Europe.
Madrid is one of the most famous cities in Spain and is full of wonderful museums. Naturally, Madrid was on our list of places we need to visit! After Madrid, we drove to the city of Bilbao, a place that people seldom talk about. Honestly, Bilbao was so much more amazing than Madrid! I don’t understand why so many people talk about Madrid? Oh yeah, they haven’t see Bilbao yet!
Rivets are a wonderful fastener. Threadless and incredibly resilient. They act as both a fastener and a hinge pin, granting incredible strength and flexibility to the structures they hold together.
Rolex has used rivets in their watchbands for decades, and they hold up well to the test of time! My 5513 ran into a slight issue as time seems to have caught up with the watch.
The heads of the rivets have worn off over the decades and no longer function to fasten the watchband securely. The links simply slip off the headless rivet and risk slipping off!
In an effort to prevent the use of authentic Rolex watchbands on counterfeit watches, a watchband is a rather hard item to procure these days. I inquired about such a purchase and was told that I would have to surrender my original watchband before Rolex would sell me a replacement, that way Rolex would be assured that their new watchband made its way onto an original Rolex and not some cheap knockoff!
Listening to the advice of my watch collecting friends, I refused this offer as the original watchband is a great part of the value of the watch itself. It would be the equivalent of a classic car without the original motor block, the serial numbers of the body and motor would be different and the car is worth significantly less; this is where the term “matching numbers” comes from.
I was faced with a dilemma! If I exchanged the watchbands, I would have a sturdy replacement for my watch that I wear daily, but it would kill its value. If I keep the watch “original”, it will also be unusable, and therefore worthless for my purposes of being my watch that tells me what time it is.
The watch smith was not able to repair the watch either, as Rolex would not authorize them to do such a repair. It seemed I was left with one clear option: repair the watchband myself.
Rivets are not a novel concept to me. I worked with them extensively when I was building a wooden dinghy. I was very familiar and well practiced at the art of making a rivet, and I had all the tools at hand! In the video, I show how a rivet works and some techniques that are useful to successfully create a new rivet head on this original 5513 Rolex Submariner.
The thought of squeezing in between two boats with nothing but your fenders to protect the topsides of all boats involved is rather painful. What makes it worse is the thought that you are backing up to a stone wall that will destroy your boat if you get too close!
No finger piers, no leeway, and no help from anyone until you are securely in your slip.
Sounds wonderful! No wonder they haven’t changed how they tie up in marinas in the Mediterranean for thousands of years!
Thankfully, this is the only place I have encountered this method of docking and just outside the Mediterranean, they don’t do it this way.
My first encounter with the procedure was in a marina in Spain, just inside the Mediterranean. I was given a slip that was 8cm (3.1 inches) wider than my boat (literally 8cm of leeway). Maddie, my wife, wanted us to tie up stern too so it would be easier to get on and off the boat, but this meant I had to reverse in a straight line with a full keel boat that has impressive prop walk; oh, and no bow thruster!
Our electric motor had the power to safely maneuver us into the slip but it was tricky! This is how I did it.
First: I accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to do this. There is no way I can back up in a straight line, so I made preparations for docking in a different way.
Second: I waited for the wind to be completely calm (thankfully this marina is in a place with no tide and no current).
As we approached, I jumped off our boat and climbed onto our neighbor with the spring line. Maddie stood on the stern and as soon as we were close enough she tossed the stern line to someone on shore. They pulled us in while I fended off and pulled us in at the same time to the boat next to us. Once in position, we then attached the bow mooring line which runs into the water ahead of the slip to tie us up and keep us from sliding back into the wall.
When we go to leave, we will simply untie and motor out of there with our little electric motor, but until then we are safely tucked away Med Moor Style!
When you encounter this type of docking, just remember to wait for calm conditions and take it slow. Know which way you walk and plan ahead for that so that you don’t end up walking your boat into someone else’s topsides!
