Repairing and Raising the Boat Shed Roof… Again

I’m slowly getting over the horror of watching 3 tonne of water (no exaggeration here) suspended in the tarp above the boat for 20 minutes before it exploded.

Through discussion and further thought about the chain of events, we believe a re-occurrence could be avoided if the tarp were raised so that it clears the sheer panel of the starboard hull. We had stretched the tarp taut over the sheer panel, however the huge rate and volume of rain in Thursday’s storm probably caused a gutter to form in the tarp along the inside edge of the sheer panel, before it began pooling at an exponential rate.

We decided to gain the clearance by adding another pole that sits 4.5m above the ground just forward of the bridgedeck. Digging the hole (by hand) was the easy part. It took us lots of thinking and a few attempts to get the 5.4m pole into the “socket” which sat .3m above the ground (and .9m below the ground). The photos give an idea of how we achieved this.

I’m concerned about the stress on the tarp around the short beam at the top of the pole, particularly as we forgot to wrap towels around it before we dragged the new tarp over. Retrofitting the towels will be tonight’s challenge!