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!