We are presently
working in the boatyard full-time. That means we are actually there for
about 3-4 hours a day. The rest of the time is occupied with fetching
and carrying stuff, buying stuff, sorting out stuff from basement and
garage, essential cat grooming etc. Housework and work in the garden has
been neglected (my heart bleeds, you can be sure!) and meals are
basically make-a-whack-of-something at the start of a week and keep
heating it up every day until it is unrecognisable! "Hmm, I think it was
kedgeree..."
We are making good progress with the boat. The Don has
lots of holes cut in the deck, over-drilled (larger holes than needed)
then filled with epoxy, then drilled to the right size. The reason for
this is that the decks of boats of this type are stiffened with a
sandwich of end-grain balsa wood between two layers of glass-reinforced
plastic (fibreglass). The balsa wood is very light but susceptible to
rot if it gets wet so epoxy is used to seal it. He also removed a couple
of apparently decorative wood plates to find each covered (inexpertly)
five (5!) holes in the deck on each side. More drilling, filling,
drilling etc!.Meanwhile I have been refinishing the teak trim and it's
starting to look quite good. Of course, it now makes the white part of
the boat look shabby, so I think we will have to paint that as
well...the jobs grow in scope, as usual.
Our current conversations with other boaters in the
yard tend to be very tedious and technical about paint "systems" (what
goes on where and how often) and which brands of masking tape,
sandpaper, varnish, are the best etc. We are all monomaniacs on the
subject of boats , all doing these jobs at about the same time. Normally
we are the only people left, everyone else launches early and heads up
to the Thousand Islands or Lake Ontario. Because of the wet and cold
weather everyone is delayed by about 3 weeks. Fortunately we are in the
tent, so we are not hampered much by wet weather.
We have taken apart the steering wheel to replace
some crumbling plastic parts. One of my next jobs is to strip the whole
steering system down, paint the bits that show then put it back together
again. It is a simple cable and pulley system attached to the rudder
head and with a length of bicycle chain over a sprocket directly
attached to the wheel. It looks simple enough. What can possibly go
wrong?
What can possibly go wrong? There was a survey on an electronics hobby blog that I read, the subject was, "What was the first thing ever you took apart? Were you able to reassemble it?"
There were lots of answers such as:
"At
age 6/7/11, I took apart the family toaster/alarm clock/VCR/lawnmower. I
tried to put it back together but I had some pieces left over and it
didn't work. I never told anyone. My parents went right out and bought a
new one."
There were a few replies intended to be amusing: "My little brother. No." for example.
My
own first take-apart project was a golf ball. Someone had said that
they had a lot of rubber inside. Well they were right. After working for
about an hour with my mother's bread-knife, I got the hard case off and
there was the amazing infinitely long piece of rubber all wound around
and around. After about half an hour of unwinding, I found a small sac
of some kind of thick latex solution. I never did get it back together
again.
Then there was the alarm clock, then the wind-up gramophone (no, I am not that
old! it was a broken, obsolete one.) I did sort of get the alarm clock
together again and it sort of worked, but the wind-up gramophone nearly
killed me. The mechanism, as it turns out, is an infinitely long spring
about a half inch wide. It was wound up. When I opened the case
(they didn't put health warnings on plastic bags back then either) the
thing came alive and sproinged all around my bedroom, taking a large
chunk of plaster off the wall. What an idiot! I did learn about
potential energy though. Heh heh...so I know about taking stuff apart.
Needless to say the gramophone was wrecked.
Our friend Chris came back from his visit to family
in the UK. His wife is there for a couple more weeks, so we invited him
for supper last night. Interesting man. He is a mechanical engineer, was
a wing-commander in the RAF, retired at about 50 to sail with his wife
from Britain to the Med and across to the Caribbean and then to Canada.
He talks like Biggles, it's all, "What ho, chaps!" and referring to his
good lady (in her presence) as "Spawn of the Devil" - clearly some kind
of private joke. He is accident prone (as are most interesting people) and very much likes singing, has
joined the local choral society. We went to a Burns Night supper at
his house and had a great time singing all sorts of stuff. He is also a
ham - he did a brilliant rendition of Burns' Ode to the Haggis
(traditional at these events). He put on a credible dialect and Scottish
accent.
For his latest project he has built a sailing boat, a
trimaran, which he is going to keep at the marina where we keep
ours. So we'll be seeing more of him. He did drop the 50-foot mast in
the water on first launching it last year, but he missed my head by at least a couple of metres and he
was suitably apologetic :-). Some of his other friends were giggling about
this. It had happened to him before on his previous boat, except he had actually
dropped a (much lighter) mast on someone's head...!
No word from the mad Russian, or her husband. Clearly that means she doesn't need me for anything just now! Good thing too.
I
am getting a bit tired of the anti-depressants. The shingles pain has
gone except for an occasional slight itch and sensation a bit like a
mild sunburn. However the other side effects are getting more peculiar. I
am very, very cheerful, but sometimes babbling words that I can't
organize properly. It's like I can remember how to think and do things,
but as the memory fades I get more clumsy and stupider. I am basically
making lists and reading them repeatedly to try to get things done. On
second thoughts, perhaps taking apart the boat steering system is a bit
ambitious in my present state of mind! Only 5-1/2 weeks until I can
start dropping the dose...
The rowing club starts in earnest in a couple of
weeks. I helped launch the rowing dock last weekend. It's made of
floating plastic cubes and is pretty substantial. The ramp down to it
needed some gravel so I have been hauling bucket-loads from another part
of the marina.It all done now. All the club members come out next
weekend (May 5/6) to reassemble the rowing boats and do the dozens of
other tasks that are needed. Things like spray-painting the channel
markers buoys and launching the coach boat etc. So we will not be able
to come to see you this weekend.
We will try to come the weekend of May 12 and perhaps we can go to a movie?
I hope you are doing well. Talk to you soon.
Sue and Don.
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