Kilsby at the boatyard
28th & 29th January 2020
Kilsby sat quivering at Tooley’s Boatyard dry dock, prepared to be stripped to her bare bones.
Tooley’s professionals worked on Kilsby while the volunteers carried the objects removed from the boat through a door in the dry-dock enclosure into the yard where a third team of volunteers split them into three piles: bits to be sold or reused, bits with historical value, and unsalvageable bits for the skip.
Motors, stoves, windows, electrical panels etc were all saved for a later date. Two skips were nearly full and the yard was rapidly filling up with bits of rotted timber and unwanted fixtures and fittings.
The speed of this stage was remarkable and all the main fittings except the engine and the ballast had been removed by the end of the following day.
30th January
Kilsby was now an almost empty hull. Excepting the terrifying quantity of ballast in the form of bricks and very heavy steel mouldings. The mouldings would have been used for die casting aluminium objects, possibly at the local aluminium factory and used in building WW2 aircraft, they are typically circular in shape, 18cm in diameter, 3cm thick, and weighing about 5.3 kilos.
31st January
Day 4 at the workshop began with a strong cuppa for 5 volunteers Matt, Jack Steph, John and Dave. The task was to transport the weighty ballast from the yard to the skip via human chain. 20 of the bricks have been kept for posterity, with romantic ideas of them being included in the restoration of Jericho Wharf.
Meanwhile Mark, Jamie and Matt were cleaning Kilsby of the bilge mud, a huge and grimy task involving scraping bits of wood, sludge and general filth into buckets for the volunteers to carry to the skip. Kilsby was hosed down by Mark before finishing for the day.
1st February
Completely stripped out and standing as an empty hull, Kilsby looked utterly beautiful with her sleek lines oozing class. Valiant volunteers from the ‘Jericho Singers’ choir sang from their water related repertoire, whilst sweeping the floor of mud (and worse) What this slurpy soup of filth was composed of exactly isnt important, it was a hell of a job made bearable by the uplifting sounds of the ‘Jericho Singers’.
Kilsby’s dedicated restoration team, now clean and smelling of flowers, can be proud of her safe return to the water. She remains under the caring watch of Tooley’s until we’ve decided quite what to do next!
Written by Cara Massarano
