Oh yea, remember those days. Swimming in the warm clear water. No schedule, work consisted of cooking and playing, a little computer work and some school work.
The fun and games are over for the next few weeks. Every two years the boat needs to be hauled out and painted. The ablative anti fouling paint we use to keep barnacles and scum from growing on the bottom is designed to slowly slough off over two years providing a fresh surface to fight growth. Eric has been keeping a mental list of jobs for us during the haul out. Most ship yards require you hire their employees to do the work and pay for each day the boat is in the yard which will jack up the bill in the end. We got lucky that here at Dennis Point Marina, you can slave away on your own for as long as you want for a reasonable monthly rate. In the end we spent a full fourteen days working from the moment our eyes opened up to when the sun no longer provided enough light to work.
My first job was to sand 47 feet of hull twice. Once on the port side and then on the starboard side. The first few days Southern Maryland heated up to a steamy 95+ degrees. We wore bathing suits so we could run over to the pool and jump in to bring down our body temperature. The sanding took four days. The first day I only wore goggles and a little mask over my mouth and nose. By the end of the day my eye lashes burned and I started developing a rash on my neck. The next day our neighbor Bob loaned be a full face mask and by the 3rd and 4th days the temp plummeted 20 degrees and I could wear the full oompa-loompa suit.
Unfortunately, everywhere the dust from the Micro 66 paint had touched sensitive areas of my skin, it swelled up with an itchy burning hive like rash. Meanwhile, Eric started working on his nine day thru-hull adventure.
The thru-hull is a pipe fitting that goes through the hull into the sea water on the outside and attaches to a valve and plumbing on the inside.
Makai is 13 years old and Eric noticed that the metal was looking corroded and pink which are signs that the valve could fail at any time. That would leave the fitting and Makai vulnerable to sea water. Eric began to rout out the old one, fill in a few holes he planned to do away with, fill gaps with epoxy, mount new backing plates, caulk in the new ones, then add the valves and new hose plumbing on the inside.
Back home Eric’s Jeep friend Tom made our backing plates. Thanks Tom! When Eric went to work in CA for August he visited with Tom and picked up the backing plates.
With all these steps he could only do two a day. In the end he replaced 12 fittings and glassed over 6.
From the inside you can see daylight coming through the hole. If Makai was in the water and the fitting failed this would be a 2″ fountain of sea water coming through.
Wow, isn’t that pretty. Tom’s backing plate epoxy making it part of Makai’s hull with a new fitting and valve.
By the end of the week the garbage pile was growing.
Once the bottom paint was on, you could barely see the hole he filled. There is just a slight ring and bump to the left and down of the newly replace fitting.
In the middle of the grinding and sanding, Eric took a day off to install our propellers. At the end of July when we left Makai, we stopped at the Post Office to ship the propellers to Washington state to have them refurbished. The factory replaced a few parts and coated them with an anti-fouling paint. Eric added a razor sharp line cutter just in case we run over a crab pot, don’t want to mess up the prop shaft, and new sacrificial zinc to suck up the electrolysis instead of the propeller and shaft.
Another small job was to reverse the anchor chain. The last few months of cruising the anchor chain was skipping on the gypsy. The gypsy is a wheel with spaces on the edge exactly the size of the chain. As the chain comes up each link sits in the gypsy and feeds the chain up and into the chain locker. Apparently, after a time the galvanization on the chain wears off from dragging over sand and gravel on the bottom and then the chain rusts. When it rusts, metal wears off and now the links are thinner making them further apart. All of a sudden the chain is no longer the right size for the gypsy and pulling up the anchor and chain is no longer a smooth operation. Lucky for us, we have 300 feet of chain and usually only put the first 100 feet in the water. So by dumping it all out in the parking lot and putting the rusty end in the boat first, we should be able to use the clean end for anchoring next season.
Now that the sanding is finished I can get to painting. When we hauled out the yard guys pressure washed the scum, scraped the barnacles and acid washed the tannin from the white topsides. The pressure washing blew much of the boot stripe off. This stripe is purely aesthetic at the waterline. Separating the bottom paint under the water from the white top sides. Every day I lightly sanded the boot stripe, wiped with acetone and painted another coat for a total of four coats in four days. Meanwhile Eric was still doing thru-hulls.
My next task was to dig the caulk out of the keel bolts. Then grind the area down with 50 grit sand paper on a rotary sander wearing the full oompa loompa suit and face mask.
One morning the weather changed and and I had to wear a sweatshirt. I cleaned up the bolts, and taped over the spaces with gorilla tape preparing it for fiber glass.
Eric mixed up some epoxy, we soaked fiberglass cloth in the epoxy and covered the bolts. Now the area is water tight but can still be accessed by cutting into the fiberglass if needed.
A coat of bottom paint does wonders on any project area.
Sunday a bike race started and ended here at Dennis point. They had a super band that had us rocking out while working. They played all the classic rock we love like Cheap Trick and The Kinks. Genny gave me a ‘look’ because these guys are old. Humph, I guess I’m old too. I told her that 30 years from now she would hear Gangum Style or What does the Fox Say from across a parking lot only to be reminded of her own age.
Eric heard some scratching in the dumpster. Apparently a family of raccoons hopped in for a snack and when the sun came up they decided it was a nice place for a snooze.
Ooo, they’re so cute!
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Matt used the fork lift to tip the dumpster over.
A few at a time they ran out to find a nap spot in the woods. One guy was still fast asleep and needed to be poked with a stick to wake up.
Since the weather is right and we have land to spread out on, I decided to do a little varnish in the galley. We have three large cabinet doors and two smaller ones. Over time water dripped down one from the sink, another’s varnish wore thin around the handle and the one where our trash is stored was just plain grungy. I taped, sanded and varnished 4 or 5 coats to make the galley look like new. Eric is finally finished with the thru-hulls and now is replacing the plumbing.
After a full two weeks, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, bottom paint.
We suited up again so this stuff wouldn’t drip on our skin. Eric got out the power mixer to thoroughly blend in the toxic particles.
I could own a sweet collection of jewelry for the amount of money this stuff cost. Instead we rolled this thick stinky paint over the bottom. Six gallons gave us two full coats of paint and then a little more on the water line and leading edges.
We found that while sailing in heavy weather, water would slosh up the rudder posts and into the back lazarettes and down into the bilge. Several times an hour the bilge pump would go off and pump the water out. While we weren’t in danger, listening to the bilge pump was a little unnerving.
Eric lowered the rudder and replaced the seals. While he was doing this he found a cracked fitting to take to the welder for repair.
For the last two weeks we worked on things inside cabinets, under the water or right at the waterline where no one notices. My last job was to buff the top sides to a mirror shine.
Matt brought me a scaffolding which moved like it had square wheels in the gravel. I went up and down, inside and out buffing the gel coat. Genny brought me bottles of cold water to keep me going. The buffer got really heavy and I even needed Eric to the last few feet.
But boy oh boy, it does shine!
The next morning I scrubbed any residue off with Simple Green and Dawn preparing the surface for Permanon. This is a product recommended to me by a friend on the Leopard Cat Group. He said he did it in the spring and it still shines like the first day. We’ll see, this is one of these too good to be true products, sort of like the Emperor’s New clothes. I just mixed up a spray bottle with water and a few ounces of Permanon, squirted it on and squeegeed it off. No elbow grease required.
A little spritz of water to prove that this relatively expensive, odorless, colorless liquid in the spray bottle actually made a difference. Water beads, whew!
Our parking spot in the yard is right next to the forest. We hosted this interesting butterfly for an afternoon and had daily visits by swarms of mosquitoes. The kids burned citronella in the cabin which really did the trick.
The starboard forward locker is Eric’s tool storage. After two years of carting around everything he imagined he would need before we even left to go cruising, he decided to thin the collection a little. We’re trying to remove as much useless stuff as we can since the van is going back to California and can take our unused treasures with it. It is difficult to reach all the way up to the bow, so Marie was sent in to drag items out of the pointy part.
The day has arrived. After over two weeks of hard work, Makai takes a ride back to the bay.
The travel lift surrounds the boat and slings are lifted under the hulls.
Then she is driven down through the parking lot and onto the dock specially designed for the travel lift’s width. Slowly Makai was lowered into the water. Eric ran around to check for leaks in his plumbing, all was good, start up the engines and motor around the corner to our slip.
We still had two full days of putting the inside of the boat back together, loading on the sails that were being patched up at the sail maker in Solomons, and scrubbing more yard dirt off the decks.
We did a lot of work but had many people to thank. The kids took care of cooking, laundry, their own school work, and kept themselves occupied for 2 weeks. Someone asked why they didn’t get in there and get dirty. The short answer is that the work it heavy, dirty, and uses extremely expensive products. We need to thank the yard guys. They were always willing to offer tools and bring equipment by. Thanks to our pals on Dream Catcher for making meals and bringing Jeanette to play with our girls, also friends of White Magic and Pas de Deux, and Livin R Dream for consulting on technical issues, offering supplies, a great BBQ and nightly camp fires. Every evening after a long shower and a snack all I wanted to do was dive in bed, but hanging out at the camp while the kids light sparklers, and roast little sausages or smores, made us feel like the day was more than just one dirty job after another.
Roy is back to fishing off the back of Makai, the girls got their hair dyed blue, all fabric we could remove went to the laundry, the refrigerator is loaded and now we’re just waiting for the wind on the Potomac to clock around a bit for us to head up to Washington DC.
Meanwhile, Nannie send a picture of Topaz and JJ doing what they do best.
