You know you’re in a different league when the shipwright suggests making the new hatch cover out of aluminium.

But I did say that Mooney Boats in Killybegs on the northwest coast of Ireland caters primarily for fishing boats. Big fishing boats. There’s a Killybegs boat working the waters of Chile at the moment.

I came here because it was the only yard I could find that would let me stay on board while the boat was out of the water – and also had the trades available for the long list of repairs and improvements I had been working on in the two years since the last refit at TLC Marine in Conwy.

And what a good choice it turned out to be.

Take a look, for instance, at the bracket for the electric Remigo outboard. I have written elsewhere about my idea for whirring silently through calms as the big 400W solar panel recharges the internal battery almost as fast as it discharges. We shall see how well this works, but it was getting the angles right that worried me.

I had drawn pages of diagrams and even tried to measure the slant of the dinghy transom with the chart table protractor. At Mooney’s they just set up a laser on a tripod.

And note the forklift truck – so much easier than setting up staging to work from. In fact, I didn’t see a ladder in the whole place – let alone the usual boatyard variety with hooks for scratching topsides. Instead, they gave me a steel staircase for climbing aboard (delivered by forklift, of course).

What about freeing the pulpit nuts? They’d been there since the boat was built, and over the ensuing 52 years had morphed into putrid brown blobs with no discernible flat surfaces to hold a spanner. I didn’t even notice they were off. I would have liked to have seen it, only there’s no room for more than one in the chain locker.

That’s why I had to have a new electrician. The first one, an enormous man who had clearly never been on such a small vessel before and had to squeeze through the companionway like toothpaste, pointed out (very reasonably) that if he tried to get under the chart table to disconnect the aerial for the AIS, he would probably cause more damage than I had already. The idea of him getting into the forepeak to move the windlass controller out of the damp was simply laughable.

I got to know most of them over the month I was there. They were called Sean and Seamus and Darron with and ‘o’ and Damien with an ‘e’. They treated me with amused tolerance – especially when they heard what I get up to and that I’m all on my own – and that was before they discovered how easy it was to drill all those holes through Samsara’s fibreglass hull.

But as the days went by, the list grew shorter: The great chunks of stainless steel to bolt through to backing plates for the Jordan Series Drogue; the ingenious washboard-cum-cockpit table and finding a way to stop the chart table emptying itself if the mast goes below the horizontal (like it did 400 miles north of the Canaries two years ago.)

In all, there were 94 hours of labour on the bill. But Mooney’s charge is only €55 an hour.

That’s less than £48!

I can only think I was getting some sort of pensioner’s discount. As Lee Mooney, the Managing Director, gave the OK to put me back in the water, even though the bank transfer hadn’t actually reached their account (“you have to have a little trust,” said Lee), there was certainly a lot of interest in where I was going next.

“Only to Galway.”

I didn’t want to frighten them.

The new aluminium cover for the lazarette

The washboard doubles as the cockpit table – now locked in place by pins holding it into a slot at the back of the cockpit and the pin on the tiller for the autopilot – ingenious.

The forklift, the staircase and the laser for getting the angles just right…

The chandlery is a bit startling…

…and they are just right.

Outboard stowage