Once more, happy integer
rotations around the Sun since your birth! I am not going to say
anything anodyne, but what I always say is: "All I want for my birthday
is another birthday."
Not much except routine stuff happening in the village . No dramatic reappearance of the Russian Princess. She flies
in tonight, I understand. All parties are on emergency alert. RP's
husband, visited our lawyer to be told that, no he didn't have
to and shouldn't leave the house, and that if she called the Children's
Aid Society about him, he was to file a complaint about her neglect
of the children...stay tuned for more drama.
In other news, we have been going to the boatyard
every day for 4 hours or so. It's coming along very nicely, we have (I
think) solved a couple of problems with the original construction - both
annoying and both involving water. It might be obvious that, with a
boat, most of the problems are of the water-related kind. However, it
may not be obvious that the type of water that is the trouble is not the
stuff that the boat floats in. It's the stuff that falls from the sky,
even on the finest night. Rain, fog, dew...our problems are two. The
first is a day one problem with the boat, the other was a day one
problem compounded by our earnest attempts to "improve" things.
I am not sure are you familiar with the ancient
engineering wisdom, called the Problem Solving Flowchart? This was one
of the first attempts at an ascii drawing that I remember seeing,
working as a young new grad in an engineering office in the '80's. http://ylatis.com/
I am not sure if Geoff or Shelagh can read the chart
out to you, but basically it says that if you fuck around with
something that's a problem, now you are responsible for the problem. So
the problems that we had on the boat were (as I said) two: number one;
there was a puddle that used to collect on the step just outside of the
main hatch, because it was angled towards the hatch and not away,
towards the drain holes. Should not be a problem, you perhaps say.
What's a few ounces of water on a step? However the times that I, or
Don, early on a fine sunny morning, drew aside the hatch, lifted out the
boards to get out and appreciate the lovely day, took a deep breath of
clean, cool air, and stepped, usually in stockinged feet, into that
puddle, is too large to number. Often, both of us would do this, twice
in the same day (the dew drops down just as the lovely stars come
out...)
You might not think that this is source of
exasperation. However if you are travelling in a boat, the number of dry
socks that one can pack is limited, and the opportunities for drying
them are also limited. Truth be told, one only gets a single sock wet at
a time, and we always buy a pile of the same socks each, so it's not
like we are walking round with mismatched socks. But it is demoralizing
when the expedition is taking place with a large number of socks
festooned around the cabin in the rather pathetic hope that they will
dry in a constantly moist atmosphere. It's like a Youth Hostel in a
particularly damp climate, (Snowdonia in Wales, springs to mind. A whole room, optimistically labelled The Drying Room, filled with the gently mouldering reek of scores of unwashed warmish, wet woolen socks and assorted other garments. Shudder.) Anyway, the step had to be modified to slope
slightly outward. Don has filled it with a plywood wedge embedded in
epoxy, and has spread a thick layer of epoxy on top. My job is to sand
it smooth, fill in the bumps, then paint it with a non-skid paint.
Incidentally, we have found a fantastic, waterproof,
non-skid paint! (I warned you, previously, that boaters,
are monomaniacs on the subject of paint, did I not?) This
product is called KiwiGrip (made in New Zealand) and is a kind of latex
paint the consistency of soft butter. You trowel it on, use a textured
roller to get a pattern of random small peaks and let it dry. Really
good on a sloping surface even when covered with water (...I warned you I
could bore the legs off any quadruped on the subject of paint.) Only downside is the price (eek!) which is considerable. The man at
the Chandlery smiles his approval when you heave a gallon of this stuff
onto the counter before him. Nothing's too good for your cherished boat
is it?
The second problem is the one we fucked with. All the authorities on restoring a boat, publications with titles like This Old Boat (or "Don Casey" as in "Don Casey says that you should...", The Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual (referred to as "Nigel" or "St. Nigel says...") and From a Bare Hull
(which, although it has a vaguely erotic ring to it, isn't; except if
you're one of us paint and caulk-stained wretches, dressed in rags,
buying paint at $200 per gallon); all of these worthy publications
refer, repeatedly, to "pulling the chain plates" as the absolutely most
important part of a serious refit of an old, tired boat. (It is
sometimes called a "thirty-year refit" for obvious reasons, I suppose,
but, like a house, you don't want to do more than one of these in a
lifetime. This is our second. Happy sigh.)
The chain plates are pieces of stainless steel bar
that are attached to the ends of the rigging wires. Basically they keep
the mast from falling down. They attach to (we hope) a strong point on
the boat, usually the sides of the hull interior. To get to there from
the outside, they have to pass through the deck, at three points on each
side of the boat, and at the very end of the bow and stern. So we have a
basic mechanical system. A strong stainless wire, under considerable
tension, is attached to the mast top at one end, and to a stainless bar
at the other end, which goes through the fibreglass deck (about 2 cm
thick) and is then bolted with four large bolts to a bulkhead built out
from the inside of the boat. All fine. So we are back to the water
problem. When we bought the boat, two of the six side-deck chain plates
leaked rain water into the lockers, both on one side of the boat.
Oh, I forgot to say that the reason that you have to
"pull the chainplates" is that, unlike popular belief, stainless steel
does rust. Not easily, and hardly ever when exposed to air. However, if
air is excluded, say by a glob of caulk to try to make the chainplate
hole in the deck waterproof, it can rust. If the corrosion gets bad
enough, the chainplate can break and the mast will fall down. The kind
of life-threatening excitement that we boaters try to minimize, I'd
say...
So we pulled the chainplates (obviously when the
mast was down), there was some pitting, which is common, but no cracks
or crevices (we used a kit of oil-based dye and a sticky white powder to
check for this; more money to the nice men in the marine supplies
business). We polished them up and reinstalled them. This involves
caulking them where they pass through the deck. All looked lovely.
We then have the mast put up again, reattached and
re-tensioned the rigging. The first rainstorm exposes the same
inevitable pools of water in the lockers. But this time it's on the other side of the boat as well! Another thing sailors are known for is colourful language...
I forgot to mention that two of the chainplates
protrude below decks in quite inconvenient places. One is in the head
(toilet) compartment where we have to remove the toilet, dismantle the
sink, bathroom closet and such to get at the bolts; the other is inside a
hanging locker. A locker that you can hang about six jackets in and
which is so narrow that you have to twist your hips to sit down in it.
Then the bolts are conveniently so high that you need to stretch up
slightly beyond reach with a ratcheting socket, feeling around and with a
flashlight balanced on your nose to undo the bolts. They say the CIA
tortures people with "stress positions" for hours at a time. Even doing
this for 10 minutes means we come out feeling pretty "uncomfortable" as
the medical profession would have it.
In short, we were not best pleased. However, we put
up with the leaks last year by putting things inside plastic boxes. The
extra moisture didn't improve the wet sock situation at all. When the
boat was hauled last year we said we would try to fix the problem. It
seems that we had had no leaks before we put up the mast, but we did
when we tensioned the rigging. Probably the pressure caused the thin
layer of caulk to separate from the deck allowing water in. We think we
have a solution to the problem, but the fun thing about this kind of
repair is that you get to try it only once a year - it costs $300 to the
very nice man who owns the marina, to take down the mast and then
another $300 to put up the mast again. I swear that there are very few
Pirates of the Caribbean these days; they are running boating repair
shops, marinas, and, of course, waterside drinking establishments where
boat owners go to drown their sorrows and argue about paint.
So that is the long, boring tale of life on the ocean waves. As if. We hope to launch before July.
Other
than that, and two dramatic deaths in the Township, not much
else to report. Usual rowing, cat wrangling, and hilling up the
potatoes.
Neither of the deaths has been classified as
suspicious, much to the chagrin of the local OPP members, who have to
hearken back to a shocking, still unsolved shooting of a police officer
in the village during the '60's to really feel like they are detectives.
However, it's always refreshing at my age to talk about someone else
dying. And it seems to get more interesting the older one gets - we are
still in the race to nowhere and someone else dropped out, I suppose.
About 10 days ago, a couple of divers found a body,
off the village beach. This is exactly the kind of excitement that
the diving geek loves. The deceased turns out to be a man from Lanark County,
who had wandered away from home, hitchhiked to the St. Lawrence and
ended up drowned. He was reportedly a sufferer from a mental illness, poor man, so
the death is presumed suicide, "while the balance of his mind was
disturbed" as British Coroners used to say to grieving relatives, so
that Church authorities would bury their loved one on consecrated
ground. There is now a driftwood cross at the beach where he was pulled
from the water. Very sad.
On Friday last, a body was found on a track behind
the marina. Another sad case. As related by a marina worker,
with more than a little relish - gossip is great currency in these
parts. We got the full story. The deceased was an older man, who hasn't been the same since his wife
died 25 years ago. His habit was to cycle daily to the cemetery by the
Seaway Lock to visit his wife, then cycle home via the LCBO to pick up his comfort. Presumably he lost his license to drive years
ago. This is the main reason the local people here use bicycles. Other
than children and yuppies, that is. He would bike through the rough
track alongside the marina (which was a railway before the Seaway
was constructed). It is mosquito-infested and overgrown but basically
passable. When he didn't get home on Friday, his son drove to the
cemetery at 1am, expecting to find his father passed out. No sign of him. The next day, Saturday, the son
set out by foot and found his father dead on the track next to his
bicycle. Poor man. He called the police, lots of commotion, yellow tape etc. and then
they waited 5 hours for the paramedics to arrive. I would suppose they consider removal of a dead person to be lower than an emergency. Needless to say, our informant was much exercised by the authorities' "not even covering him up in all
this heat and flies and everything" - with some justification I think.
Then a boater's wife came into the marina office where people
were talking quietly to the man's son, and made a crass remark that
anyone would think there was a dead body out there, there's so many
police cars about... to their credit, they said, "Yes, it's the father
of this man here." Swift retreat of loud-mouthed lady...
Anyway, that's quite enough gossip and dramatic paint-drying stories for one letter...
See you guys soon, we hope,
Love,
Sue & Don.
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