The Plover Project -- Life in the Boat Yard (Part 8)

Making Lists:

I'm a list maker. I'm not one of those people that can keep it all in my head. I have to write it down and sometimes, if I complete a task that wasn't on my list, I will add it to my list just to experience the satisfaction of crossing it off. I know. Sick. My list of stuff to do has become 4 separate lists:

1. Stuff we gotta do today.
2. Stuff that can wait until next week.
3. Stuff that can wait until next haul out.
4. Stuff we ain't never gonna do.

Painting:

We spent the past few days painting. I've gotten one good coat of bottom paint on and will add a second coat. I love painting the bottom because I don't have to worry about making it look nice, I just have to get a nice, even coat of the thick, copper-filled paint on everything below the water line. We lucked out on our bottom paint and found 2 gallons that had been discontinued for $20 a can. The normal price is $200 a can.

We decided to paint the cap rails and rub rails instead of varnishing them. After almost 50 years of sanding and varnishing, and sometimes letting the varnish go and allowing the wood to become weathered, there was no way we were ever going to get them to look nice. We cut out and replaced sections of rot, sanded them as smoothly as we could get them, and started getting paint on them. Replacing the cap rails, rub rails, and bulwarks have been added to List No. 3, Stuff That Can Wait Until Next Haul Out.

Chris is taping off, I'm painting:

Green bulwarks, primer on cap rails and rub rails:

Our neighbor made window frames for our larger windows:

Chris got this box to mount our masthead lights on:

The Plover Project -- Life in the Boat Yard (Part 7)

I haven't posted much lately mostly because it seems like I don't have much to say about our progress on the boat. For example, today I sanded. Yesterday I sanded. I sanded the day before that, too, and I will be sanding tomorrow.

We did take care of some things that we had been putting off. We built a storage shed that fits on top of our flatbed trailer, cleaned out our storage unit, stored all that crap in the storage shed, and then guess what we did? We worked on the boat, e.g., sanded.

We spent 2 weeks at the local crack hotel so that I could completely paint and varnish the interior of the boat without messing up our nice cushions and everything else we own. I was able to set up a varnishing station in the kitchen area of our room and started each day by putting another coat of varnish on a few pieces I brought over. At least the smell of varnish masked the heavy cigarette smoke aroma that permeated the entire room. The hotel was surprisingly quiet (we expected crack head brawls about midnight every night), free of roaches (except for the extremely large one that resided in the bathroom and flew through the air, landing on Chris and traveling down his arm one night), and had a seemingly unlimited supply of hot water (although Chris enjoyed turning on the kitchen faucet while I was in the shower, causing me to get scorched and then frozen). Shower or no shower, launched or not, I missed living on the boat and was happy to move back aboard.

Aside from sanding, varnishing, and painting, I have learned a new skill. I put threads on all the bronze rod that Chris had cut into 3 inch lengths for attaching our chainplates to the hull. It was interesting to do, I had to be very careful to make the thread straight, and I only chopped off a small section of the tip of my index finger on my left hand.

Guess what I'm doing?

What do you think? Good idea?

 

First coat goes on.

 View from the bow:

View from the ground. That's our neighbor's boat in the background.

That's John Goodman standing on the stern, helping Chris. I don't know what we would have done without his help.

 

Newly painted cockpit.

The Plover Project -- Life in the Boat Yard (Part 6)

March 1:

March means Spring is here and Winter is officially over (in this part of Texas anyway). It means warmer weather but not too hot. Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes. My birthday is this month -- yippee :) I love March.

Today we paid our boatyard rent for the (hopefully) last time.
We also paid our rent at the storage facility and gave our 30 day notice to vacate. I was looking at what is left in there and it is significantly less than what we originally stored. Still, it will be a big project to get it cleaned out because, other than the initial organizational fervor of shelf building and box marking, nothing has been done to maintain order. Most of the time, we drop by the storage to pick up a tool or some piece of hardware, and leave as quickly as we can.

I saw my framed college diploma leaning precariously against the back wall behind some shelves. There are miscellaneous boxes of boat hardware that we have rifled through when retrieving usable items for Plover. The sailing rig for Sherpa, our dinghy, as well as the sailing rig for another dinghy, now long gone. All of our camping gear. All of our fishing gear. All the sails for Plover as well as a collection of miscellaneous sails. A bin of stiff, dirt encrusted dock lines. Several small anchors. Boxes of household items we haven't yet parted with. Books. More books. The list goes on....

I'll get some pictures ready for posting next time. I'm too tired to deal with it right now.