There's another saying (sailors have a lot of them) about boat owners. The two happiest days of a boat owner's life are 1: the day he buys his boat; and 2: the day he sells his boat. I'd love to be able to say that all of our days (or even a majority) as sailboat owners are like the picture below.
You actually have to remind yourself to have days like the one above, otherwise you can spend ALL of your time fixing your boat. There's NEVER a time that there's simply nothing to fix. Most things have to be done more than once...either because of inexperience, bad advice or information, or complacency. With my current project, believe it or not, it was not the latter that caused my encore deadlight re-sealing. When we bought our boat, the deadlights (windows on the top of the cabin that don't open) had been leaking for quite some time. This caused mold and wood rot on the inside of the cabin. One of the priorities upon becoming boat owners was to seal up these lexan windows.
Re-sealing of these windows involves scraping out ALL of the old sealant and cleaning all surfaces involved. Easy peasy. Why would I tell you about any of this if it was that straightforward? I did all of this last spring..only to find that the windows started leaking again in the fall...just as rainy season came back and Nick left for Puerto Rico for two months. Right after he left we were hit with a tropical depression which luckily didn't deposit much rain. In anticipation of the storm, however, I duct taped the windows where I could and slathered silicone sealant on much of the rest...just to avoid more leaking. These measures at least slowed the leaking to a manageable amount through the rest of rainy season. However, they are a PAIN IN THE ASS to remove.
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| Old tarp |
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| If you have to use a tarp...make it a shiny one!!! |
In order to be able to take my time and re-do this job properly (using the correct sealant this time) I first put up a tarp we had inherited with the boat. We hadn't used it before. Turns out it was well-used. After cleaning much of the dust and paint chips that dumped out of it when opened, I proceeded to do my work under it. The fiberglass under it that L and his friend had just polished became dusty and dingy with....micro-tarp. Super small pieces of tarp rained down every time the wind blew. Little did I know that these were also embedding themselves behind my contact lenses. No boat work the next day...but yet another trip to Navy Hospital....and the tarp store. Nothing like fiberglass shards in your eye to slow your project a bit...I also learned to be more specific when asking the kid to grab my small green bottle of eye drops from the bathroom...
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Several days later, I thought I was ready to finish and put the first of many windows back in place. Just needed to buff the window. Buffer, where's the buffer? No freakin idea. Project paused. Again.
So Nick found another project to distract me in the meantime...he found an empty space under a seat in the v-berth (4 cubic feet is A LOT when you're planning to live in a space smaller than an average bedroom.)
In order to make this space usable, I needed to drill a hole in the board covering the space, as well as sand it so it fit better. First things first...find the drill and drill bits. Check. Upon opening the case of bits, I discovered that water had crept in and all the bits were rusty. WD-40 and a wire brush had to be found before progress could be made. Several tools then had to be used to remove the screw from the mandrel so the pilot bit could be inserted. It took WELL over a half hour to drill that one hole.
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| This is the wire brush that came with the boat. Who keeps something like this? |
I thought things were looking up when I found my trusty rotary sander on the first try. Nevertheless, my sander developed a fatal disc separation shortly after beginning.
Why do we need a tarp?
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| This is actually what progress looks like. |
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| https://sailingcartoons.wordpress.com/tag/boat-yard/ |
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