“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.