Monthly Archives: April 2023

Great Refit 2023: Woodworking 101 and Other Projects

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We are truly checking things off the list aboard S/V Galapagos. It’s almost like we plan to go cruising again or something. I remember this part of preparing to go last time. It did not feel real then, and somehow, it doesn’t feel real now. There are always so many things that can delay leaving the dock, and the attachments we form to life on land are many and deep. It’s just not easy to let go of the dock.  And that’s on every level: physical, emotional, psychological, financial.

Preparing to move back aboard and leave my garden. Again. Transitions between lives: not my forte’.

But we’re doing it anyhow because the good years we have left to live and will be physically able to do things like cross oceans are passing. Fast. Here’s a short list of what we’ve done in the last couple of weeks:

1 Dropped sails off at Ballard Sails in Seattle to be looked over, and have a new ATN Spinnaker Sleeve installed so we can reduce the number of shit shows on the foredeck when we deploy that sail.
2. Dropped the Viking life raft off for servicing at the Viking facility in Auburn.

Get a load of all those life rafts!

3. Made a running start on installing the new radar pole on the aft deck. This pole is complete with a davit for lifting our new-to-us dinghy engine. Photos another day on this.  This involved leaving the slip, docking the boat in a tight space with only a few feet to spare front and back, and getting back into our slip…all with zero drama. Zero. Drama. My favorite kind of drama.
4. After much perseveration, Michael has ordered new blocks for the mainsheet, choosing to go with the Garhauer 50 series, which is a step up from what we had. We’re excited to play with the angles of the sheet in relation to our hard dodger once we have the deck block in hand.
5. We’ve brought home all the lines and washed them so we can examine them closely to see which ones we’ll want to replace.
6. Continued reorganizing stowage, getting rid of excess stuff we don’t need, creating a manual spreadsheet (otherwise known as a notebook) noting where everything is stored. Note: old line, stored in a plastic bag, makes a dandy filler for oddly shaped bilge areas, creating a flat platform that allows things to be stowed in those areas safely. Why didn’t I know that before?

My manual ‘spreadsheet’. Sometimes I just need to be old school. And these lists, divided by cabin, have already come in handy.

7. Replaced the leaky, albeit brand new, Lewmar hatch in the salon. They sent us a new lid. It does not leak. Finally.
8. Removed the clear polycarbonate window inside the cockpit, looking down into the galley. Bought replacement. Refinished teak under that, filled old screw holes with epoxy, sanded, then painted that part of the cockpit with Total Boat paint. It works great and has held up in other areas, including the sole of the cockpit. Replaced window with new, clear version. We are pleased with it.
9. Painted the ceilings and around all the ports. I’m using Dutchboy Cabinet and Trim latex gloss paint in Nantucket Grey. I painted some of our fiberglass with this stuff years ago and it has held up really well under hard use. Impressed. Working on replacing the dated and worn-out curtains. It’s time for a fresh look.
10. Michael climbed the mast and installed the vane for the anemometer. Now we are a yacht. Both wind speed AND direction? Wow. It’s so fancy.
11. Begun bringing stuff back to the boat from the storage unit. Only the important things first. Like books. And Patrick the starfish. But where is our stack pack for the mainsail? We truly are flummoxed. It’s not like this is a small item that can be stuffed in a corner somewhere. Did we get rid of it, because we were never really happy with it? Unlikely. We are generally loathe to get rid of canvas. But searching the basement, the garage, and the storage unit has revealed nothing so far. The search continues.

We know what’s important. Patrick and our snorkel gear.

The big task checked off the list: put the woodwork back around the chainplates. We are dead pleased with how this came together, and with how we’ve showcased our new boat bling. When you pay this much for stainless steel, you kind of want to show it off. So here’s the end result.

The wood we chose was due to a combination of expediency, availability, and cost. A quick stop at our local hardwood shop for woodworkers brought into sharp focus what we’d be up against if we decided to go with something like Brazilian mahogany or, gods forbid, teak. Not only would our costs absolutely be knocked out of the park, but we’d also be faced with needing to have the wood milled, adding time and costs to an already tight budget and timeline. We decided to go the expedient route and get milled poplar, available in a number of different sizes from the local big box store. Although it’s a soft wood, not my preference for this project, the areas where it’s used are protected and these new chainplates are unlikely to leak. I’ve sealed the wood against swelling due to moisture. However,  if this wood, for any reason, doesn’t hold up over time, it will be very easy to replace it.

I apologized to the gods of Teak as I chose all the sizes I needed to do the job, and then stopped by the paint counter to look at wood stains. We wanted something that would contrast well with the blond wood already there, and also be different from the teak trim we have. To try to match that would have been difficult, if not ridiculous. So instead I went with making it look different by design. In the end, I had stain mixed to my own specifications, having the paint counter worker add brown colorant drop by drop until I got the warm shade of almost-redwood I was after.

Re-purposing some extra teak trim at the bottom to give a nod to the rest of the wood trim in the boat.

Back at the boat, the project came together much more quickly than I anticipated and soon our chainplates were the star of the salon, surrounded by painted fiberglass that matches the paint I used years ago to cover the dated almond colored fiberglass used throughout the boat. That paint job has held up really well. I managed to recycle some teak trim we had from other remodeling projects to accent the new frames above and below, tying the new wood to the old. I call this interior look “Nautical Industrial Chic” (TM).

This weekend we are dog sitting with Emmett, who is definitely an adolescent Aussie. We are forced to sit around and do nothing for a couple of days, which is not our style but I guess we need the break. I imagine we will move back aboard sometime in May.

He’s thinks he’s so grown up.

But, wait! There’s more! As though we didn’t have enough going on, turns out we will be losing the tenant in our little apartment early in May.  I look forward to a fast and furious, but seriously long overdue,  re-do of that space before we say goodbye to the dock.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16.

Afternoon Gin, Because Rain

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Not really. I mean the rain is real, but I’ve cut back on my afternoon gin dramatically even though yes, it’s raining as usual.  Also the evening wine. I’m not doing as much of that either. To be fair, I don’t really like wine. I know. No one likes a woman who doesn’t like wine. I’m more of a fruity beer or good cider kind of person. But those have too many calories/carbs so I decided Prosecco wasn’t just for celebrations and bought myself a nice wine cork meant to keep the bubbles in your bottle in the fridge. It works. I do like a glass of bubbly. But you can keep your red wines, thank you very much. You know what else I don’t like? Mushrooms. That’s right. Their texture is like rubber to me and I just can’t.

This lack of the ability to tolerate the texture of the mushroom is, apparently, related to my brain. Lately I’ve come to understand that there’s a fairly new word for how my brain works (or doesn’t, as the case may be): Neurodivergent. Huh. Go figure. I find this very amusing.  I mean, everyone has their quirks. Maybe I’m more quirky than some but I never considered myself ‘divergent’; a word which somehow seems like it probably means something close to antisocial, also something I’ve been accused of. Sure, I “diverge” from being told what to do. I consider myself somewhat of a free thinker who chafes at the constrictions of polite society, although I do have a moral compass. Of sorts. Maybe the life I lead “diverges” from the average path.

But as used here, this word that apparently describe my brain and its workings means neurologically divergent from the norm.  It’s a word reserved for people whose brain processes information differently, or learns somehow differently, or causes behaviors that are atypical. The only problem is that there are so many people whose brains are ‘atypical’ that it leads me to wonder why the typical people are not the divergent ones. Who gets to decide what is typical, anyhow? Probably someone who lives a beige life in a beige house and eats beige things. Like mushrooms. Phooey on them and their probably boring beige lives.

Making headway in that salon, just figuring out how everything fits together.

And where are all these other neurodivergent people I think I notice? Evidently they all live in Olympia, where people wear their divergencies on their sleeves; like they almost literally show them off. Maybe being neurodivergent is like the new blue/pink/green hair or sleeve tattoos. Like maybe it’s just all the rage right now and I’m actually normal. Maybe that’s why, overall, I like Olympia. I like that no one bats an eyelash when I do odd things like wear my little red wool pointy gnome hat well into the spring when it’s clearly a Christmas accessory;  or drive a Mexico van that was obviously completely paid for decades ago; or wear the exact same outfit for weeks at a time (a little trick I picked up as a cruiser and adopted in my land life because who cares? Not me, and clearly not you, either, because you never even noticed). Try that in some snooty city and see how far you get!

In Olympia, people generally smile at me and slow down so I can cross the street safely no matter how weird I look. One time I even got sent home with an entire box of fresh French pastries from the bakery on the corner. I feel certain it’s because I showed up in my red wool pointy hat since the van, which smacks just slightly of anti-capitalism and looks like it’s driven by someone whose idea of a perfect croissant can be found inside a cardboard tube in the refrigerated section of the local Safeway, was parked at the house. Or maybe they thought I just looked hungry. I’ll never know. I just smiled and thanked them because those pastries are like $4.50 apiece and French.

There are a lot of people like me here; people whose brains work in such a way that it’s impossible for them to remember how to tie a bowline even though they have learned it and relearned it countless times. My secret shame. I always blamed my brain, because why not? But now I understand that I was actually right about that, so I can move on and just accept it. After all, I’m divergent. Not anti-social, just a little bit different from a beige and boring definition of normal. Whew! I’m so glad.

We’ve had a bit of a delay working on Galapagos while Michael flew to Tennessee to make sure his mom was ok. She is fine now, which is a big relief to us all. But we were dead worried for a hot minute there and he felt compelled to go be with her, which is exactly how it should be. We are in the middle of putting the salon back together and it’s going much better than we had feared but we kind of lost our groove for a bit.

We were honestly so burned out from the big project of tearing the boat apart and getting the chainplates/rigging done that the puzzle that is the woodwork in the main cabin felt like a bridge too far. But enter the reality of the checkbook balance, not to mention the uphill trek of finding anyone who might do a better job than we could, and it seemed wise to just move forward the best we could. We have the port side done and I am close to finishing the starboard side. It’s coming together. When we move the cushions and mattresses back on board I have promised to open one of those bottles of Prosecco I have stockpiled around the boat. We will truly feel like we have arrived. Oh wait, no that’s not right. That day will be the day we reinstall the bow pulpit. THAT’s the day we will have arrived somewhere.

The list of tasks, it is still long.

In the past, our chainplates were hidden behind really beautiful teak boxes. Those boxes did look grand, but to take them off to check for leaks meant removing bungs, which then was a woodworking job to replace them and touch up the finish. We are not fans of hiding the chainplates, and so we are not going to do that again. With the addition of extra fiberglass to repair the considerable damage that had to be done to replace the backing plates, those areas where the chainplates are attached are now too wide to accept the box covers. So. We are going to show them off instead. I have a cunning plan on how to make them look attractive and to intentionally bring attention to them, my divergent brain at work here. We’ll do a post when that’s complete.

The old salon, where you can see the box hiding the chainplate in the background.

We’re getting there. Foreshadowing represented by the bright green paint on the fiberglass underneath the chainplates. And I look forward to refreshing the finish on this yellow cedar, which was finished first in 1991 and has not been touched since then. It’s good to know the previous owner of your boat so you can get this kind of intel about it.

On another note, it’s looking like spring outside, which I notice when I put my winter clothes on to go on my brief forays to the outside world. When we spent springs in Mexico on our boat, I did not suffer from allergies. Or from cold. Our third spring, I think, here and now I remember how spring hates me. Or maybe I hate spring. Or, more specifically, I love spring but my body hates it. The only cure is to get out of this environment again.  I am always cold here except during summer. And it seems I forgot that I also suffer from sinus infections here in the Pacific Northwest season that passes for spring, but in reality is just an extension of winter. This makes me unhappy. I want to go dig around in the dirt, but I’m allergic to everything growing in it, especially the molds that live in good soil. Dislike.

Speaking of spring, it feels wrong that I am not busy buying plants for the garden. Since I won’t be here to care for them, it doesn’t seem prudent to add to the gardens we already have.  I have spent the better part of spring for the last 35 years getting excited about growing new things and plotting where to place special plants in the garden so they show to their best advantage. I love plants. They are so mysterious in their ways!  In spite of the untenable amount of work our old yard in Lakewood was, sometimes I miss my garden there. I miss my greenhouse a lot. One year I started over 100 different kinds of seeds, after spending the long winter reading esoteric seed catalogs and going on a seed buying spree. Fun times!

A few hard spring plants I brought from our extensive Lakewood gardens.

We drove by the old place a few weeks ago and it was the first time I’ve actually cried about missing it. I disliked Lakewood, on the whole,  and do not want to live there again. But I miss my glasshouse.  It still looks like it did when I left. It still has the same “Dream” sign up above the door. It’s like I stepped away from it and never went back, which is actually what I did. Nothing has changed in the gardens that I can see from the road and it doesn’t look like anyone uses the greenhouse. I don’t think I can drive by anymore. It’s too hard.  The man who lives in the house now lost his wife shortly after buying the place. I imagine he does not use the greenhouse. It languishes. I hope he doesn’t languish with it. It’s a sad situation.

The glasshouse at our old place.

A couple of weeks ago our realtor friend, who is a really thoughtful man, called and told me he was listing a house and the owner had left a lot of nice gardening books behind. He wanted to know if I wanted them. His call came after a couple of weeks where I had been regretting getting rid of my rather extensive library of books about gardens and plants and all that stuff. I couldn’t believe it. Do I want the books? Hell, yes! He said they were nice books and I believed him. I made arrangements to go pick them up, not realizing exactly what I was getting into.

When I arrived at the house I was shocked to discover there were about 300 books, all of them like new. Books about garden planning, about famous gardens around the world, about perennials, bulbs, roses, annuals, exotic plants. There was a copy of almost every single book that I had got rid of when we moved out of our Lakewood house. Some of those books are hard to find anymore. Books by Ken Druse, Dan Hinkley, Rosemary Verey, Penelope Hobhouse… I stood, wordless, at this offering from the universal good. Knowing he really needed to move these out of the house, and not having the time to go through them at the moment, I just took them all, taking them to the car in piles heavy with the joy of discovery. It took me an hour to load them all. Good thing I still have my Mexico van! It was a treasure trove for a frustrated gardener.

Not even halfway finished bringing books to the Mexico van. A quick phone pic sent to Michael.

At the house, I unloaded them into the living room and commenced going through them all, picking and choosing those to keep and those to give away to others. It was glorious and gave me an exciting task to do while Michael was in Tennessee. Claire had just flown to Europe for a much needed vacation and I had the house to myself. The living room was literally filled with tall piles of the most glorious books. Just the sheer pleasure of looking through books that were like old friends and finding new ones to explore filled a couple of afternoons. I selected those I wanted and gave the others away but, honestly, if I were in a bigger house I would have bought an entire bookcase just to keep them all. Now I have my library back, which feels right even though I cannot be going about the business of building more gardens at the moment. It’s a promise for the future to have these reference books again. I do wonder about the gardener who bought all of these very expensive books and marked pages carefully with little sticky notes. Who was this person? And how did they manage to collect so many books? I would love to know that story.

After carrying all the books to the car, I noticed this lamp sitting on the floor near where I had been working through the piles. Feeling a little tingle of serendipity, and having been told I should take anything else I found in the house that I wanted, I decided I had room for this. It’s like the Universe spoke out loud in that moment and, in spite of how it’s a little bit kitschy, I felt like it made a certain statement. I’m not sure where it will end up; this house or another one. But with a new, neutral shade, it just might work. I might chose beige, the backbone that holds all other colors together.

I love a weird lamp. Especially with boats on it.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16 because our radio works again.

Also, it’s not lost on me that my photos are kind of all over the place lately. Someday I will get better at that again. Maybe when I stop using my cellphone and remember how to get other photos onto my computer.