16th May 2011 – A major job aboard the Hornblower is cleaning the bilges. I firstly removed the wood by driving a few times to some people with a wood fire. The rest, I took to my parents in Ostend. It is sad you need to remove the wood, but it is rotten and badly damaged during the last conversion.
The bilges haven’t been cleaned for years!
Everything you remove makes you think. It had been put there for a reason, people spent money on it. If it had been better maintained, it could have lasted much longer! Now I need to remove everything, clean the metal again, etc…
I’m pretty much convinced the ship has been doubled, I found to many tiny holes in the original bottom of the ship.