Wooden handrails - a blessing or a curse? Plus a short marina tour.

Herbie has two unusual features. One is the hinged hatch lid and the other is the wooden handrail atop the cabin sides.  The wooden rail has the great advantage of not getting too hot or cold to put your hands on in extremes of weather.  However the downside is that wood is not so weather resistant as metal and the fact that it moves differently to the metal it is screwed to means that the paintwork on it tends to suffer.  So I need to paint it at least every two years.  

Over time the wood has also developed cracks and abrasions here and there, so prepping it for repainting is a non trivial task.  I did the starboard side rail (not as well as I should have done) last autumn, so last weekend I set about the port side rail determined to be more thorough.  Sand, fill, wash down, spot some more cracks, fill, sand, wash down again etc.  I didn't count how many hours but was quite a few and it's still not perfect because the wood is now twenty years old.  Anyhow here it is in new pretty pink undercoat

 

I would have put on a top gloss red coat but then it started raining, so that'll have to wait. Then I've only got about twenty other jobs to do.

While "watching paint dry" I took walks around the marina which is looking very smart right now with smartly clipped hedges and lots of daffodils.  The sign on the road gate outside makes a bold claim

I don't know if it is the prettiest but it must be a contender.  (These photos all look rather better if you click on them to see them big)

The marina has two separate basins called Sunrise and Sunset.  Both are spacious.  Here's just a part (about half) of Sunset.

Herbie nestles up in a quiet corner of Sunset. Here she is settling in last summer

The Sunrise basin is huge (too big to photograph) and spread between a number of bays And here's about half of it.  You do need to click it up big to see it properly

A far cry from the overcrowded feeling of some marinas.  A walk round both basins is about a mile and a quarter!

Ventnor does not allow residents (apart from a couple of staff) although I noticed someone is planning to start a resident family on site.