This year, 2025, has been the worst year for sailing so far. Naiad was out on the mooring early enough in the year, but with Tina away for so many weekends during the season I could not sail on those weekends, and the weekends that she was not away, either the weather was not conducive to sailing or I was confined to the house. Early in July I had minor surgery on both feet that had the effect of my not being able to wear shoes and for the first two months after the surgery I was not able to walk properly, just hobble.

I will be glad to finally retire in 500 days, not that I am counting, as that will mean that I will be able to go sailing during the week when the weather allows as most of Tina's events are on weekends. So roll on 2027 !!

I was finally able to wear shoes, although not without some discomfort, in mid-September and since then I've not had a weekend free to sail, despite wanting to.

Of course there are two problems with sailing right now. The first is that the hull will need to be scrubbed as I have no doubt that she is fairly fouled, so I'll either need two weekends to get that sorted out or two consecutive good days. The second is that I still have two strained tendons in both elbows caused by lifting the very heavy dinghy into the racks at the sailing club. These are slowly getting better but, I either have to get someone to help me with getting the dinghy back into the racks, or I need a much lighter dinghy.

The upshot of all this is that I probably will not be able to sail until I build a new, lighter dinghy, so I have decided that Naiad should be taken out of the water and returned home for the Winter.

And that means fixing the travelling trailer.

The trailer is not of a welded construction but bolted and this allows movement in the frame which, in turn, allows Naiad to rock about the axle and her bows smash against the front support. When we took Naiad down earlier in the year this caused some damage to the bows. Fortunately I noticed before it got too bad and wrapped a towel around the offending support and tied it on tight with rope.

To fix the problem I am going to mount a second longitudinal member from the hitch all the way back to the axle. This will be fitted under the existing member which stops well short of the axle. To do this, various cross beams will need to be removed from their position under the side beams and placed on top of the beam.

This is the trailer before modification. There are two cross beams under the centre and side beams. These are the two that need to be repositioned.

I had been spraying the nuts on the u-bolts with penetrating oil for about a week and most of the nuts came loose without too much effort. One refused to come off and I had to resort to cutting the u-bolt. The nut just became rounded which stopped the spanner from being able to grip.

Two of the other u-bolts had the threads stripped partially as you can see here. The upper part of the bolt has no thread. So I need to replace one of the four narrower u-bolts and one of the three wider ones. Since I had to order the replacement u-bolts anyway, I elected to buy enough to replace them all. There's no point in being stingy with something like this, better safe than sorry, as the saying goes.

I also have to make a number of backing plates like the one you can see in the above photo for the u-bolts on the new centre beam.