Friday 25th & Saturday 26 April 2025
We are getting La Bamba ready for her new season. Spot the new Bimini:
This included replacing the spacers in the goose neck. In Henan they had to replace our original gooseneck, which was apparently the wrong one, and they put fibreglass spacers between the pulleys. These had cracked during our journey home so Arcona had new carbon fibre ones made.
I was a bit nervous about doing this because the gooseneck holds two vital things together: the mast and the boom. David braced everything with extra halyards and the invaluable handy billy.
I was very glad to see that we didn’t have pull the pin out completely
And the sail-less park avenue boom makes an excellent tool surface.
Obviously the replacement spacers weren’t quite the right shape and David was delighted to use his inexhaustible set of boat tools, in this case, mini angle grinder and sander.
This didn’t look quite right
We think this should work
I also got to use David’s ‘Qingdao hammer’ which was fun.
The next evening we got on with obviously the most important thing: putting her name on properly
Anyone who went to our school (British School of Brussels aka BSB) will know exactly why we chose this name – suffice to say it’s from Ritchie Valens’ classic song – a true party number. La Bamba means to sway which is also appropriate.
Poor Ritchie Valens only got out a couple of hits as he was on the same small plane that crashed with Buddy Holly. He was only 17 – he certainly made his mark.
David did mention that no one else in the marina has a pink name, but then most other boats don’t have an enormous park avenue boom either
We are very grateful to Tony who helped place it so perfectly. David’s font design was inspired by the original record:
And thanks also to Jess who helped me with the wine drinking and the positioning confirmation!
Now we need to get the sails bent on so we can enjoy this perfect weather.
The nice thing about having to drive up and down to Lymington is when we go through the New Forest
All the gorse is in flower and we saw tiny horses!
We also saw a days old foal:
