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.

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.