Joss partially sank on her mooring in Dartmouth in 2006 and earlier in her life she lived in a mud berth for 18 months. Somewhere in this she acquired a thick layer of mud in the bilge. On the basis of doing the least possible before re-launch we tried a bit of scrubbing with a brush and hose pipe in the portside aft cabin and under the engine. The trouble is that there was a reserve of mud under parts of the sole we had not lifted and however much we washed it stayed muddy. We kept removing another part of the fittings an taking up another section of floor and we ended up with an almost bare shell.

On the basis of doing the least possible before re-launch we tried a bit of scrubbing with a brush and hose pipe in the portside aft cabin and under the engine. The trouble is that there was a reserve of mud under parts of the sole we had not lifted and however much we washed it stayed muddy. We kept removing another part of the fittings an taking up another section of floor and we ended up with an almost bare shell.

A virtue of this was realising how much space was going to waste in the bilge. In the centre of the main cabin there was over six feet of headroom, but moving aft toward the galley headroom decreased to a point where it wasn’t possible to comfortably stand at the sink. With the sole up, it became clear we can drop the level by about six or eight inches.