Author Archives: Melissa

Great Refit 2023: Una Mas Margarita, Por Favor!

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“Have mercy!”. I am saying this so much lately. I wish I could be saying it with a southern wave of the hand in warm, sunny weather. Alas. We are cold and damp, as usual up here.  In terms of this refit, we are back to living life in front of a firehose of things to do. What’s going on in refit-land? We’ve made progress. And by “we”, I mean “Michael”. Because I’m too busy working to keep the cruising kitty filled. I mean, the truth is it gets drained about as fast as we can fill it up. Thank goodness for Michael’s new three-day-per-week schedule or we would be, once more, faced with having plenty of funding but no time to get work done. While I’m holding down the fort seeing clients, he’s down at the boatyard making progress. It’s a tricky balance.

At this point the fiberglass is all cut open and the patient sits in her slip awaiting her new bones to the tune of about $3200. Yes, that’s the toll these brand new chainplates and backing plates have taken on our account. The thing is that we’ve owned this boat for so long now that we are kind of used to numbers like that. “Oh, only 3200$? A mere pittance! Una mas margarita, Por Favor!”  Ahem. My god. I guess I will work a little extra next month.

So shiny.

We are almost ready to rumble with these new chainplates. Hans’ busy schedule has generously offered us a date of February 20 to get this party started. We’ll go to the work dock, where we will stay for a few days while he works his fiberglass magic and puts our Galapagos back together down below so we can install the new chainplates. Should be a messy business but we will be excited to see that kind of movement on this refit.

This little tent protects from elements when necessary. It is, after all, winter up here.

Down at the boatyard Michael has begun addressing the main mast. Many of the fittings must come off so we can check for corrosion underneath them. The mast is aluminum and most of the fittings are steel. At some point those two metals were protected from each other but now? Let’s just say vinegar comes in handy divorcing dissimilar metals that have married each other in a wedding of time. So far we have been pleased with how little corrosion we have found underneath major fittings. Those areas will be cleaned and sanded back, then etched with acid wash, primed, and painted.

While Mike has born the brunt of the yard work on that mast, it has not been all work and no play for me.   True to form, since we had to disassemble that aft cabin for the aft chainplates, including taking out the mattresses, I decided I would replace/improve the mattresses. In the spirit of making our boat more comfortable for our aging bodies, I replaced our mattresses with pure organic firm latex foam. This is because we are currently enjoying the luxury of our latex mattress at the house. Both of us love that bed to the point of distraction. It’s just so supportive and yet soft, so cool and yet warm. Once you’ve experienced a latex mattress it’s hard to go back to foam. It’s also mildew resistant, which is important in high humidity areas.

Naturally, and you already know this about me, I’m not going to pay good money for a mattress someone else made when I can do this work myself. I struggled with myself for making that choice and wonder about my sanity because these mattresses are big and heavy and difficult for me to manage, but here we are. I just put my shoulder to the proverbial wheel and got started. Going to my favorite organic latex retailer, Sleep On Latex, I ordered two firm 2″ king sized mattress toppers and one 1″ firm topper. In our storage unit we already had a soft 3″ latex topper we were not currently using.

From this…

When on a boat, I approach physical comfort with what amounts to an almost religious fervor, a personality quality that does not always make me very popular with captains of the more “salty” variety. And as we get older, bodily comforts are even more imperative. While our mattresses were by no means worn out, they were definitely showing signs that the newness had worn off. When it came to my own mattress, the word ‘wallow’ comes to mind. Turns out when they were built, my mattress was put together in two pieces in order to make best use of resources. The seam was, you guessed it, right where my most prominent body part resides: below the waist. I am not a fan of wallows. They interfere with my rest and without my rest, well, let’s not even go there.

To this. I did have to buy the knife, which will barely make it to the end of this project before giving up, I predict.

This is the stuff to glue these pieces together. While I had to “piece” part of the side of each mattress, the area where our bodies lay is one long stretch of latex. No seams.

Back to my favorite organic latex supplier: SleepOnLatex.com. By stacking three of their firm mattress toppers on the bottom and then using a soft latex topper, I was able to create a solid latex mattress, 8″ thick, for less than about 800$. Yes, our mattresses are 8″ thick. Please reference the above comment about comfort being a high priority for us.  True, I had already paid for the soft topper, but we had used that for over a year before it went into storage. That was already a sunk cost. I needed king size in order to do both mattresses, so buying a ready-made mattress would have been 1500$.

This projects is done. We have our living room back.  It’s nice to have one space that is not overwhelming. The new mattresses patiently await installation, resting quietly in our storage unit. And I never want to do that again. (Dusts hands off and walks away.)

Now that the mast work is well and truly underway we turn our thoughts to choosing new line for the halyards and sheets and thinking about booms and reefing systems and all that fun stuff. More on that later in the next installment. We have progress, folks.

 

S/V Galapagos, standing by without a radio currently. Our antenna is down.

 

 

 

Great Refit 2023: Deep Waters

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Little Cunning Plan Status: Pain

“While the aft cabin is torn apart, I’m going to explore the space under your bunk for installation of the water maker. Because I don’t have enough projects going on.”, Michael said over his margarita. I could not tell if he was being serious. Sometimes his sense of humor is drier than the Mexican desert in summer. I paused, taco in mid-air.

Having a storage shed has come in handy, even if we are truly tired of requiring one. All cushions, plus Patrick, off the boat.

“Sure. OK. I’ll put that on the list that will take us into 2024 with this refit.” I was only half kidding as the taco completed its journey. We’re not in Mexico, but some days we wish we  were. So we’ve discovered a really great little Mexican place right down the street from our house that makes the best margaritas and  tacos we’ve had since La Paz. All the staff are Hispanic and speak little English. It’s great. If we don’t look at the bill, we could pretend this refit was behind us and we’d already sailed back down south. Alas. The bill comes.

And have I told you lately how happy we are to own a house right now? Happy. Very. Because S/V Galapagos is unlivable. Very. You could not pay me good money to live on that boat during this refit, and during the winter. Nope. Not even a little bit. Wait. Hold on. This refit is going to be super expensive. How much are you willing to pay? I might be willing to negotiate, after all. Every woman has her price. Especially when she owns an old boat.

I need some of these lovely little cups. And the tequila that lives in them.

When I last wrote about this extensive refit, back in November, we’d just decided to replace all of the chainplates. What we didn’t know at that point (oh, sweet ignorance how I miss you) was that we would need to also replace mild steel backing plates that have complete disintegrated. The way our boat is built, the chainplates are backed by these thin steel plates that are then wrapped in fiberglass. Then the chainplates are bolted to that substrate. To be clear, these backing plates are so rotted and rusted away that this boat has probably been sailing without them actually adding value for decades. But now that we know they exist and that they are basically just flakes of rust, we have to replace them because to not do so is to do this job half-assed and we don’t want to roll that way.

Under a thick layer of fiberglass, we find this. This one is in the best shape.

Others look like this one that is in the forward head.

Here’s a section of fiberglass that was removed. It’s 3/4″ thick.

The problem, and the reason for the delay in making progress (other than the holidays), is that we had no plan. We had options on how to go about all of this, but no solid decision and no way to make the decision without professional consultation. Michael finally lined that up last week and a firm decision was made on how to move forward. There is something about having a plan, at least, that makes things feel better. And we got to work quickly after that.

In a nutshell, we are deconstructing our boat to its bones and it’s traumatic for us. This is just painful. Literally we have felt so over our heads with this project that Michael had to look our rigger in the eye and say, “Tell me that this is going to be OK. Tell me that we are doing the right thing and that we can get this done. I need this encouragement from you. I need to hear these words right now.”  And it’s true. We do need some encouragement. Like Peter Pan, we’d be happy to have people clapping their hands to give our work wings,  and also praying, spitting and spinning, or whatever other ritual comes to hand. We will take all the good wishes and all the positive energy people can send our way.  Because honestly, if we did not have complete faith in the people doing this work with us, we’d be close to throwing in the towel. Maybe we’d take a vacation and think about it and come back to it, but still, we’d be close to just saying, “Let’s sell this boat to a 30 year old with more energy and more money than sense and get the hell out of this. We will just fly to Fiji.” And that’s just being honest.

But we aren’t quitters. Not yet, anyhow. We may be getting older, we may be curmudgeonly, we be slightly anti-social and we may be tired and want naps. But by God we are not quitters yet. Give me back my towel, you yahoo. I’m not done with it yet.

As we discussed over our tacos, we’ve felt over our heads before and just carried on, one step at a time, and then at the end of the day we pulled it off and did a good job of it. Like that time we hit the rock in Mexico and put a hole in the bottom of the keel. Looking at the repair we did on that part of the boat, you can’t tell anything ever happened. So we’re going with that for now. We’ll get this done. I’m not sure what this means in terms of when we get to leave the dock, but first things first. We’ll get it done.

This repair involves cutting a lot of fiberglass that is 3/4″ thick to reveal the disintegrated backing plates, removing the plates,  and then having Hans, our fiberglass guy, come in and wrap new steel backing plates with glass. He will then fiberglass that package to the boat. Hans might be the only person we would trust with this work.

Why is this work so important to get right? Because these repairs will hold the chain plates. The chainplates are attached to the rigging. And the rigging holds the mast up. The mast is that tall pokey thing that holds the sails. So that’s a lot of stress on what is a very, extremely, undoubtedly, magnificently important structural part of the boat. No skimping. No cutting corners. It must be right. It must be solid.

Anyhow, all this means that all the wood trim has to be removed and the plywood underneath against the hull in the salon also has to be removed down to the glass. It’s a very big job and it feels like we are straight up ruining our precious Galapagos. Logic tells me this is required. But it’s a real leap of faith to think that she can be put together again good and strong as new.

Our poor girl. There was a bookcase here at one time. You can see the traces of an old leak on the right. The white stuff is rubbery sheet goods over a plywood backing. We have to remove about 6″ of plywood on each side of these cut out areas to expose the fiberglass. I will take care of cutting that while Mike puts his back into the fiberglass cutting.

In the aft cabin More beautiful wood trim I removed yesterday. All labeled and numbered and bundled. I hope it can go back up without issue.

In addition, nothing ever goes back together the way it was before. The areas where Hans will be adding more glass will be thicker than the original, meaning that we’ll have to get fancy in figuring out how to put all these wood pieces back together. I’m ahead of myself on that, but since I’m the one taking down all the wood slats, I’m the one seeing that putting them back together might be more interesting than taking them off.

And how much is all this going to cost? Who knows? I mean, does it really matter at this point? That’s like a surgeon opening up his heart patient only for someone to pop in and ask how much he charges to sew up the patient. What are the choices when you have come this far? That answer will be revealed in due time. Meanwhile, we keep our jobs.

S/V Galapagos, standing by.

 

 

Who Am I, Anyway?

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I mean, lately, I’m not even sure. We have spent the month of November doing extensive house work, yet again. House work? What the.. what?  I don’t expect you to follow this without context, but play along.

When I last posted, we were deep into our 2022 refit of Galapagos. We were moist. We were cold. We dripped around; sad that the sun had finally decided to hibernate for the winter. The masts were pulled. The chainplates were pulled. I think I left out the part where we decided to just do the right thing and replace all of those. That will be about 1500$, please. Fine. We’ll just pay it. I cannot be bothered about what is, for this refit, chump change.  They’re the last chainplates we’ll replace in this lifetime. The bow pulpit is staged to be reinstalled. We think Mike may have fixed the leaking brand new hatch but we don’t actually know for sure. Because we are not there to monitor the drips. That is, we are in Tennessee. Not Olympia. Keep up, will you?It was not a pretty landing, but we made it back into the slip without harming anything or anyone. Win.

Having pressed pause on what was a hurried and stressful haul out, we escaped to sunny Tennessee to live the life of digital nomads and help Michael’s mom catch up on some maintenance on her beautiful old house. I swear to all the gods that as we pulled into her driveway,  the house breathed a giant sigh of relief and then, almost stealthily, began to allow things to fail; sometimes spectacularly. The dishwasher failed with water all over the floor. A drain pipe in the basement failed with water all over the floor. We saw a mouse in the kitchen…on the floor. (And where there’s one…there’s another upstairs in the closet noshing on one of my protein bars.)  Electrical plugs had seen better days and needed replacing. Gutters needed cleaning. A balcony railing upstairs had broken. Electricity to the pond outside had not worked in years, and anyhow the pond pump was kaput and the biological filter was sad. Ivy was systematically destroying parts of the garden and the brick walls along the road. The list was long and we’ve been incredibly busy but we realize that this is just what we do. We work on things. We do projects. We repair things and we maintain things. Maybe it’s something born into us. Our sense of accomplishment is great. We’re actually, I don’t know..really good at this.Just one of many gorgeous rooms in this historic home.

But I have to tell you: I am having more and more trouble reconciling all the different lives we seem to lead. There is the ‘everyday working for a living life’, there is the ‘refitting the old boat and spending all the money we’ve made working for a living’ life, there is the ‘we own an old house and like to keep it in good condition so we need to keep working for a living life’,  and now there is the ‘we need to go to Tennessee and visit, also work our day jobs, and give Mike’s mom a hand with her really lovely old home so it doesn’t fall apart life’. At one point, we had a cruising life.  So many lives. I’m having trouble keeping track of…me.

The transitions are becoming brutal. We had, at one point,  a life whereby we went on a vacation in Hawaii and scuba dived with Manta Rays, but I am not sure I was actually the person who did that. If feels too long ago and far away and it may have actually been my doppelgänger, such is the disconnect I feel from the person in those photos I have. Was that just a really good hallucination?  It was last March, if my calendar is to be believed. Surely that wasn’t so long ago?

Maybe it was me who took this photo. Maybe not. I’m not sure.

Anyway, transitions are becoming problematic. And not just psychologically. Also inter-dimensionally, even physically. Like I need at least two days to recover the sense of myself and where I fit in the time/space continuum after moving from one timeline to the next. I can’t be rushed. I need a long sleep and lots of psychological rest, or something. I’m not really sure what to call it. But I do tend to get extra cranky if I don’t get the long sleep and the lack of talking to other humans.  I am being literal here.

Sometimes we spend time staying at the house in Olympia for one reason or another, like taking care of our grand cat and dog. I sense more of that coming soon since I really do not love the idea of freezing my rear end off on a boat in the middle of winter in the dark/rainy/cold/hideous season we call winter. We haven’t discussed this with with our daughter, who lives in the house, but I feel sure a conversation will arise. Here I am in front of a roaring gas fireplace on a comfy antique couch and all I can think about is how cold the toilet seat is in the boat when I get up in the night. While I’m in this comfortable and beautiful house, I don’t even miss my boat. And I do not mind working on this house. It’s too lovely to mind what is, to me, a small amount of labor to keep it going.

It is not cold in here. This pleases me.

Anyhow, every time I go between the house and the boat I lose things: Electrical cords, shoes, clothing, skin care products. Always there is something that goes to live in the land of between and I am left feeling confused about where my things exist. I guess as long as it’s not my own self getting lost between timelines, then I should be ok with it. It’s not that I’m disorganized. Is it? It’s just that the boat is literally the only place that I know where things go. So when I’m at the house, or here in Tennessee, my stuff just kind of floats around finding its way to me, or not, as the spirit moves it. I’ve tried really hard this trip to keep track of my things. We leave next Friday. We’ll see if all my little life necessities find their way home with me.

I imagine we’ll hit the ground running with boat work, although I do hope to get a couple of days, or maybe a week, of sleeping and hanging around in my pajamas before that happens. Maybe at the house. Not at the boat. No talking, ok? I need peace and quiet in order to find myself again.

A little wildlife excitement from Tennessee. I have not seen one of these in decades.

The mast awaits and we are paying 8$/day just to let it sit there in the boatyard. Expensive real estate, that.  The mizzen is at the house, so we aren’t paying for that storage. Currently we are shopping for a rain cover to use while we are in the boatyard during December. All these changes sure make life interesting if I can remember which life I am leading at the moment. My cruiser life feels very far away and in a totally, completely different dimensional space just now. I hope I don’t forget how to do it.

The only sea around here is this sea of cotton growing in the fields. I am sure going to miss that blue sky when I get back to rainy old Washington.