Last week we left our slip again and sidled up to the work dock at Swantown Boat Works. We had an appointment with destiny. That is, Hans and Heather of Osprey Boatworks were going to meet us there and get started with installing the new backing plates and chainplates destined to give us a feeling of safety and peace at sea.  We had been warned that this project would create a lot of nasty fiberglass dust in the boat.  My attitude, while not exactly glib, was of the ‘not to worry, I know how to clean’ variety. “We’ll be doing a lot of grinding and sanding and this fiberglass dust is going to get everywhere”, said Hans. One day, I will learn to take people at their word.

Mid project, I say hello briefly before running up into the cockpit to escape the poisonous fumes. There is no breathing below without a respirator. In case you are curious, that sign is translated to say “Bidden or unbidden, God is present”, This is written on Carl Jung’s grave and this plaque has been hanging in my office since I graduated from my master’s program in 1989. Michael got it for me because my “major” was Jungian studies. I love it and will always have it hanging in my home, wherever that will be.

OK, well we figured we would close up the forward cabin, midship cabin, and aft head, draping the closed doors with heavy plastic and sealing the cracks around the doors with blue tape. Hans looked at me in a way I interpreted as kindly but which, actually, was a look most people save for the dying. It’s a look of compassion and knowing; a look of long life experience that allows people to go through their motions without having to educate them on the futility of their actions. He knew our fate, if not our airspace, was sealed.

The workspace in the salon.

And so it came to pass. After a little over a week at the work dock, a week of grinding, sanding, laying fiberglass, and more sanding, we got a text from Hans. “Your boat is ready for pickup.”, he said. Huzzah! The work was done. We’d take the boat back to the slip, give her a quick wipe down inside, and then Michael could finish preparing the mast step for the final push of this long project: putting the rig back together.

Down at the work dock at slack current, Michael went below to get the chart plotter and make sure the engine was ready to start so we could take the boat back to her slip. “Wait until you see the inside! It looks great and they got everything cleaned up, too!”, he shouted from the cockpit.  Hans and Heather had vacuumed the workspaces and tidied the boat beautifully.  It sounded like our cleaning work was going to be pretty easy and, indeed, the salon and aft cabin looked as they did when we left the boat the week before. We were so impressed! Of course, it was dark when we left the dock. We could not actually SEE very much.  It’s these moments of childlike excitement, where we have not yet been stripped of the innocence of our naivety, that keep us going.

Inside the navigation cabinet. INSIDE A CLOSED CABINET SPACE. We crammed things in there… to protect them. Ahem. Nope.

Alas. The light of day, watery sun shining through gritty ports, told a different story.  While our careful efforts to contain the carnage probably helped a great deal, the amount of dust we found literally on every single surface; every wall, inside every cabinet, between every dish, inside every cup and glass…well let’s just say that we have our work cut out for us. We had been warned. But just as we failed, at the beginning of our first cruise, to imagine the tempest that is the Sea of Cortez on a bad day, so we failed to understand Hans’ careful warning about the nature of this hideous dust. It’s one thing to understand something ‘on paper’, as it were. It’s another thing entirely to experience it. I imagine even the inside of the oven is covered with a fine film of deadly white stuff. I guess I better remember to check.

This boat is filthy; a word which as used here means it probably will never seem clean again no matter how good I am at cleaning. Everything will need to come out of every cabinet and be wiped down. My carefully folded Turkish towels will need laundering again.  I guess it’s a good opportunity to go through things and get rid of stuff we don’t need, maybe reorganize some space. I am grateful we had the foresight to remove all the mattresses and cushions from the boat. Thank goodness we had also had the foresight to cover Hiram, our Beta Marine 60 HP engine, with length of heavy marine vinyl and tape plastic over and around his doors. I took the vacuum to all of his exposed parts anyhow, just to be safe.

We began today, bringing one of the filtered vacuum cleaners from home to begin our work. Armed with this machine, a bucket of Fabuloso cleaner that smells like Mexico, a basket of clean microfiber towels, and warm water, I began in the aft cabin and am working my way forward. I got the aft cabin, aft head, and the shop done today. I got half of the galley done. At least all the dishes have been washed. The good news is the boat smells terrific. Tomorrow I’ll get started on the rest of the galley and the navigation area.

The other good news is the new chainplates look fantastic. They did such a good job and they even sealed the openings in the deck against rain.  Here’s the story in grainy photos so you can see how these things are put together on this boat. The photos are extra poor because I was literally holding my breath while taking them, careful not to breathe in the toxic fumes of curing polyester resin. Man, that stuff is powerfully horrible. And I want to live a little longer. I have fish to visit with.

All laid out and labeled.

Hans and Heather dry fit one of the chainplates before they get started.

Backing plates were mudded in and allowed to set up. This green stuff is extra smelly.

The backing plate on the right is glassed over. The left one is ready to glass over. They leave a stud in the hole at the bottom for reference. Holes will need to be drilled in exactly the right places for the chainplates. This stud allows them to place a chainplate in the right position where the holes will line up with the holes in the backing plates exactly to be drilled.

A new chainplate is finally installed with new bolts. Isn’t it lovely? We’ll be dead before this needs to be done again.  Mike thought he would be responsible for putting the plates in. We were thrilled when we found out that was part of Hans and Heather’s job. We are very happy to pay them for a job well done. We’ll let you know how much this set us back when we find out. But it’s money very well spent.

Tomorrow is another day. More cleaning, Michael finishing up getting the mast step in order. Then we get the mast stepped next Friday. It’s coming together and we truly look forward to getting this boat put back together.

S/V Galapagos, radio unplugged and safely encased in a plastic bag.

Here we are, looking at a work dock date of February 20 to get the fiberglass work inside the boat started so we can get the chainplates installed. I feel very much as though we are setting up a series of dominoes and when they begin to fall, they will fall into a nice clean pattern. Things are coming together, but if I know one thing right now it’s this: during such a big project, it’s really nice that we have owned three boats and have countless numbers of boat work projects successfully completed behind us. Otherwise, we would not be sleeping well at night. At all. We also know that there is a solution to almost every problem if we just relax our minds long enough for it to emerge. Failure, as they say, is not an option.

This gives us a certain amount of peace during what is decidedly not a peaceful time for us on any front. Life does not stop happening just because you have a big boat mast in the yard awaiting your attention,  and balancing all the activities and responsibilities, not to mention the considerable emotional labor involved in those responsibilities, feels burdensome; some days more than others. Let’s just say that once we get this trip under out belts, Michael and I look forward to a long stretch of doing nothing but puttering around in a garden and workshop somewhere and perhaps, one day, dying peacefully in our own beds having lived a full and interesting life. We can only hope to be so lucky.

Tomorrow our family is attending a memorial service for our daughter-in-law’s grandmother. She passed away at home with her family all there supporting her journey. It really does not get better than that. She will be greatly missed as she was greatly loved and gave that much love in return.

I do not speak of the end of life in any kind of dark way. We are all going to face death at one point. It’s just that at our age one begins to feel mortality in a way that younger people cannot, and should not have to.

. We are doing our best to plan for that final event by making our children’s lives easier when that time comes because they are the ones who will bear the burdens we have left behind, whatever those might be. So we try to clean up our act in advance and get all of our legal ducks lined up in order to make it easier for them to cope when that time comes. Death is really hard on the living.

Meanwhile, the mast has been getting some attention to detail. Having discovered that our VHF antenna was actually full of water, and that the coaxial cable was not even attached to the antenna, we decided it was time to replace both; an easy decision to make.  The failure of the cable to be attached to the antenna is a mystery we just cannot solve, unless it was due to vibration over time. We don’t even know how our VHF radio was working, but it was. Maybe the water conducted current to the antenna? Who knows? But off came the antenna (a recalcitrant beast that did not want to give up its hold on the mast crane) and out came the old cable.

A victorious Michael. No one can stick with working a problem like this man.

Getting the cable out was easy. Getting new cable run through the mast…not so much.

All wires in the mast are run inside conduit that is riveted to the mast in a couple of places. It looks like at some point a new conduit was run using PVC. I say this because the original conduit is aluminum, like the mast. That’s the one we had to use because it goes all the way to the top. Michael had run two tracer lines when he pulled the original coaxial cable, so we figured these would make pulling the new coaxial cable and the new, much smaller diameter, Garmin GWind wind instrument wire through the mast much easier.  That’s where we were wrong.

The conduit on the left is the one we had to use and you can see how crowded it is in there.

Having taped the two wires together and attached them firmly to the tracer line, we tried to pull them through at the same time. They got stuck about halfway in and the line we had used to pull the wires, which had too much stretch, broke under the considerable force of Michael pulling on it. Curses. Pulling the wires out to start over proved to be an issue as they were well and truly stuck. Visions of cutting holes in the mast swam in my head.  But we have learned over our long experience with boats to just keep working the problem until the solution emerges. We figured they were stuck about mid-mast where the  wires that run the spreader lights and deck light emerge from their tiny holes. We poked around those wires, pulling them, pushing them, pulling on the stuck wires, pushing on the stuck wires.  Thank goodness for our wireless Sena headsets. We were able to keep up a running conversation with each other, in spite of the occasional curse word from Michael.

As a rule, I am the one with foul language, having never been allowed to use it as a child. I have made up for lost time. I learned at my grandmother’s knee and while she would let forth with the occasional “well, sheee-att”, which is the way it’s said in Texas, my mother did not approve of my emulating her. Apparently my potty mouth has rubbed off on my husband who now utters the words with impunity after 40 years of marriage. I blame myself although he, also, was linguistically repressed as a child. He grew up in a town run almost completely by the Church of Christ. You may have noticed that while we do go visit, we have never lived there. Anyway,  we have entered the second childhood of our advancing years and don’t have the bandwidth to choose our words more carefully when we are frustrated by things like boat projects and stubborn coaxial cable. I do not apologize.

Drilling out a rivet we think might be hanging things up in there. Michael is sporting the latest in ear fashion: the Sena headset. We do not leave the dock without these.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of what felt like wasted time wiggling wires, Michael gave one more almost Biblical heave on the stuck wires and Huzzah! They came free. High fives and “Good Job Team Galapagos!” for a job well done without damaging anything but our nerves. Happy hour was right around the corner, and well deserved!

Now to try to get those wires run again. On our second try, Michael produced a 100 foot fiberglass fish tape that would be sturdy enough to do the job without breaking. When the the yard work creates feelings of failure and frustration, the boat owners go shopping for new tools. And so it came to pass that he bought this nifty fish tape and also a little borescope camera he could stick inside wee holes in the mast to see what was inside. He’s always wanted one. I am pleased for him. We also walked to the boat and scrounged about 125 feet of small diameter dyneema to run as a tracer line. I mean, as it sits now, that boat is nothing more than a glorified storage unit of bits and bobs that we have not removed to the house. Yet.

That dyneema line will not break! We will, however,  replace that with something less expensive to leave in place in case we ever need it. The second tracer line Michael had run was still in place and we used that to run the fish tape up the mast so we could attach the coaxial cable to it. It went up smooth as silk. Of course it did.

With these new tools the work progressed rapidly and, naturally, by the time the job was finished we knew what we were doing. Fortunately, it’s unlikely we will ever have to run wire up our 60+ foot mast again in our lifetimes. (Knock on wood! I am not throwing down a gauntlet to the gods of boat work. Let’s be clear about that. )  But if we do, we know how to finesse the wire so it doesn’t get caught. And how to run one wire at a time and not get fancy trying to do too much at once. Pro tip: when pulling wire through a mast, slow and steady pressure on the pulling end wins the day. Don’t stop and start. Just do long, slow pulls. By walking backwards in the yard, I was able to pull about 30 feet at a time before having to stop and rewind the fish tape. That worked really well.

Shouts of joy erupted from Team Galapagos when that black electrical tape came through the bottom of the mast, indicating success!

Wire in, we now await some paint colorant that will tone down the blinding white paint we ordered to paint over the primed and ready spots where we got rid of corrosion on the mast. We were actually very pleased at how little corrosion we found, even though there were considerable small areas where the paint was buckling.

We had ordered the Total Boat Wet Edge paint in flat white, and it certainly is. White, that is. I called Jamestown Distributors and talked to their technical folks who told me the only way to fix this was to mix in another color of their paint. Unfortunately I need only maybe a drop or two of black to tone this down and it’s a flat finish. Their smallest can of black comes only in gloss and I didn’t want to buy an entire can to use less than 1/4 teaspoon of paint. I asked if I could not just use universal paint tints and the rep said no. But they had to color their paint somehow, so I did not take her word as gospel.

Sure, we probably will not see it once the mast is back where it belongs. But we will KNOW it’s there.

Very little research time later, I found that Total Boat sells an entire set of Mixol paint colorants that they use to tint their paints. Bingo. That led me to a listing on Amazon for a little bottle of Mixol universal paint colorant in black, just what I needed. So we await that delivery today and when it comes I will use that to tone down that blinding white to the more subtle tones of a white mast that has seen a lot of sunshine. I’m sure it will work just fine.

We ended the day today on a high note as Michael successfully drilled holes in the mast for things like that new wind instrument and I don’t know what else. The new coaxial cable awaits installation of the new Morad VHA/AIS antenna. Michael is so excited he is napping with the instruction booklet.

I leave you with the latest photo of our grand dog, Emmett. He is very serious.

Or maybe this look is because he knows he is about to get neutered.