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.

I’m trying to hurry and get another post up by way of documenting this dang refit for Galapagos. I want to be sure to keep up with posting about this process so that in my dotage, when I start acting my age (old), I can look back on these years by reading this blog and say to myself, “Yes, Melissa. Those were the years of insanity. No one can possibly understand why you do the things you do. Not even you.”.

Let’s review: the boat has zero masts. They are in the work yard awaiting our attention to their many needs. We don’t have time or inclination to work on them because: dark, cold, rain all the time. It’s either two out of three, or it’s all three. No need to choose. They are all bad choices anyway. We hate winter in the Pacific Northwest and wonder why this is the life we chose. And it’s not even technically winter yet.

We have two new Lewmar Ocean hatches. One of them leaks. That’s right. Our brand new hatch leaks, possibly in two places: the corner and one of the hinges. It does not leak from where it’s gooped to the fiberglass opening. It leaks from the lid.  It makes me tired. It also makes Michael tired. We don’t know if we need to make a warranty claim or not. Mike put in Creeping Crack Cure, something that he should not be having to do on a brand new hatch. The hinge still leaks, but not the corner, we think.  There has been no time to deal with this during daylight hours. Tomorrow we will go talk to West Marine about how we might go forward to fix this issue. We will have some milky daylight where we can perhaps see what’s under the hood of that hinge. And if we have to make a warranty claim, we better get to that sooner rather than later. Why is that, you may ask? Keep reading.

The translucent white of Creeping Crack Cure, which surely did creep into the boat from some crack somewhere and drip onto the sole, where I wiped it up with a sponge.

All of the chainplates have been removed, and what a trial some of those were. It’s not enough that they were behind cabinetry. Some of the bolts were in places that Michael literally had to cut holes to get to them. In this illustrative photo, Michael has drilled two large holes through the wood so he can get his socket wrench extension onto the bolts and then have enough space for leverage to turn said wrench. It was fun times aboard, let me tell you what. When Michael is hard at wrench turning, I make myself useful by standing around and chewing my fingernails, maybe snapping a photo or two with my phone. I’m talented like that.

Embroidery by a beloved “daughter”. We love this piece and find it to be astutely expressive on some days.

Some of the heads of the bolts broke off as he leaned into them, leading us to suspect that the chainplates were bad but they didn’t look bad at all at first glance.  I don’t know, we’ll see. Actually they looked really good when we pulled them out and polished them up a bit but we know better than to go with how they look on the outside. Magnified, they still looked good. But what do we know? We dropped those off with our rigger to take a closer look. We await his decision with guarded checkbook and perhaps shallow breathing. If we do not have to replace literally all of them, we will be happy. They are made of stainless steel that probably does not even exist anymore. Anyhow, getting those removed was a very big win for us. We’ll take it. Sighs of relief all around.

This magnifying glass is maybe not strong enough to find the tiniest of cracks. But it was fun looking. These chainplates weigh a lot. This is before they got cleaned up. The bowl of shells serves as a reminder that there is a reason for all of this work we are doing.

Let’s see. Oh yes, the bow pulpit is still not installed. We had to take that off to get it repaired. We took it to a welder and they did a barely passable job but it will have to do because we aren’t going to give them anymore of our money. I filled the attachment holes with epoxy in anticipation of redrilling them, and that’s all we had time to accomplish. So it’s tied down on the front of the boat. That means the lifelines are sagging. Galapagos looks pathetic. I try not to focus on that for now. Hey, at least those holes in the deck do not leak. They’ll wait.

The good news is that Michael is done with working full time!  He is cutting back to a 3 day workweek. This is a good thing, because it’s close to impossible to work on a boat and work full time at this point. Honestly, I’m not sure how we did it before when we were driving to Astoria every single weekend to love on Galapagos and we also owned a big house with a substantial yard. Did we somehow live in two dimensional spaces at once? Did we magically expand time? Were there actually more than 24 hours in a day back then, almost 10 years ago? I literally do not know how we made that work because it’s clear we don’t have that kind of mojo anymore. We just do not. Come to think about it, I’m actually not sure how we also raised two kids, but here we are.

Precious baby. I look at cat/dog videos a lot lately. Try it. Animals are the best. No, he doesn’t live on the boat with us. I would like him much less if he did.  He looks friendly. For now. Looks can be deceiving.

So you’d think that with Michael’s new 3-days-a-week schedule beginning next week things would begin to get done around here. But that’s where you are wrong! HA HA!! Nope, we will be spending the rest of November at his mom’s house in Tennessee. It’s been too long since we’ve been there to visit and we can both use a break from the stress of boat ownership in the nastiness that is the Pacific Northwest winter. Cold, wet, and dark. No thanks.

And that’s why if we need to make a warranty claim, we need to do it sooner. Because we won’t be here to do it later.

I am not making any assumptions about what will or will not get done between now and next spring. I’m focused on the weather in Tennessee, which is still in the 70’s with sunshine. Yes!!! We still plan to leave the dock sometime after March 31. It’s possible some things will get done at anchor somewhere. That’s our plan, and we’re sticking to it.

Look how much he has grown already!