I headed down to Corpus today, to remove the rails from the coachroof.

As I suspected, the hairline crack in the port rail was a clean break. It is old, so probably predates my purchase of frank.

Now I will try to get new ones made, with the fallback of repairing and revarnishing.

The survey is finished, and next week I will go to start the paperchase with US Customs, to get Frank imported and then reflagged.

I spent last night and all day today stripping 31 years of varnish from the floorboards. 

Almost done.

The grotty boards at the bottom (below) are my deck at home, not Frank’s deck!

I have to finish stripping the varnish: the discolored areas you can see are varnish stripper – where there is no varnish residue, it has evaporated, so I just have a few areas left to scrape.

The inlay is actually very thin, and in some areas it has been worn away. However, a good coat or three of varnish will distract from those flaws. 

The board at the back of the saloon, nearest the heads, has a crack on the underside, which I will patch up amd reinforce.

Tomorrow I will head to Corpus and remove the handrails, bring them home and start refinishing them. I also need to order the new Stack Pack sail cover, to replace the damaged one, from the guy in Port Aransas, if I can find his number.

Since buying her in 2013 I have been trying to find the hull number of Frank – when Sadler was building the boats they did not have a formal way of marking the hulls with the build number.

Thanks to the Sadler Discussion Forum and The Sadler Owner’s Association I now know that Frank was the 67th Sadler 34. 

“My records show [the first buyer] bought the Sadler 34SE in 1985 with the Hull

number 34/067, sail number K8652Y…

Interestingly enough she was built alongside a 34 build no. 066 which was

for the Yachting World editor, Andrew Bray. ” (Nigel Thomas, of the owners’ association).

So now I know. Built 31 years ago, hull number 67.