Boat Repairs/Maintenance – Page 7

Monday, Again

Ok, five days since the last post. Wheeeeere to start.

I survived the rains of last week without incident. Actually, the rains are a really good thing, as they help by pointing out any spots where the cabin still leaks. I *think* I’ve got them all now, and it’s almost time to start painting! I have to admit, the boat is looking better and better and better – I mean it goddamned well better be, given the amount of hours and money I’ve been pouring into her. Still, I needed a good project and every hour that I work on her she becomes more “mine”.

I spent the whole weekend working on her, again – third weekend in a row of two solid eight-to-fourteen-hour days fixing, upgrading, grinding, fiberglassing, sanding, sanding and sanding. I’m starting to run out of things to fix which is a really, really good sign.

Thursday was a bit odd though – I basically wore out my Mastercraft random-orbit sander. The bearings just “went”… I went back to Canadian Tire to see what they could do about it, and they said not much without a receipt or at least a transaction number. Of course, I can’t remember when I actually bought the sander, I think it was around two months ago. Two lessons learned: keep your receipts, and don’t buy the cheapest power tool just because it’s on sale. A hundred dollars later, I have a new DeWalt sander.

When I returned from the store with the new sander, I arrived at my rowboat and looked out to see a large, shiny, expensive fishing boat tied to mine! Obviously I jumped right in my boat and rowed out as fast as I could to find out what was going on. Apparently the guy lost one of his two transmissions, and wasn’t able to get his boat out of ‘forward’ to steer back into his marina properly, so he quickly dropped anchor and called his mechanic – but apparently where he dropped anchor wasn’t the best place, so he drifted right over into my boat. He put out his fenders so there wasn’t any damage, but he was still bumped right up against me. He explained the situation

“So,” he said, “I thought I’d just tie off to you for a while until my mechanic got here…”

Which he had – his docklines were now tied to my boat, and my docklines had been untied and lay on my deck. Now, I’m a pretty friendly and gracious guy, so I didn’t lay into him – still, I’m pretty sure that boarding someone else’s vessel without permission is considered a hostile act under maritime law, so at the very least it was very poor manners. I glowered at him some and hurried him along until he realized that he was utterly unwelcome to stay tied to my boat for any longer than absolutely necessary. He made some noises early on about leaving his boat there overnight, but I think my derisive snort got my point across.

To top it off, my anchoring permit, with my cellphone number written on it in sharpie with a message saying “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PLEASE CALL:” wasright there, posted in the nearest window. If running into someone’s boat and having to tie off to it isn’t an emergency, I’m not sure what is.

Anyhow. Within an hour his mechanic got there, and they got the boat untied and moved along – I’m not sure if he was fixed or if the mechanic was just a better pilot, but whatever. Barely a thank you, and no hint of an apology. I don’t know whether he was just a newbie boater, or didn’t consider live-aboard squatters to have the same rights as people from an expensive marina, or if he was just utterly oblivious. Still, I have half a mind to borrow an RV from someone and go park on his lawn for a couple of hours with ‘engine trouble’.

The weekend was mostly calm, with twenty-odd hours of hard work in the sun putting a new layer on my tan. I got a tonne of work done on the deck, spent way too much money at the marine store again, and finally installed my LED lighting system. I had gone to Ikea mid-week last week to find the fixtures, and managed to find the perfect fixtures – these ones to be precise, in white plastic. They have a fixture-mounted switch, they accept the LED bulbs perfectly, they have a long cable, and they’re mostly plastic so they’re ideal for the marine environment. I am incredibly pleased with these lights! I had purchased five, with the intention of putting two in the salon, one over the navigation table, one in the bathroom and one over my bed – but instead I installed all five in the salon and will have to purchase more. WOW though – I do not at all regret the purchase, nor the decision. In one step, the salon at night has changed from “camping” to “home”. The light is warm and pleasant, and the difference in the general “feel” of the place is staggering. I will be purchasing another five of these lights, at least. The best part is that even with ten lights installed, I will still only be drawing a total of 30w of electricity to light the entire boat – just about half the draw of a *single* regular lightbulb!

Today, it’s back to the grind. We’ve committed to having one of the gossip sites live and launched in the Amazon cloud by Wednesday. Just in time, the weather has turned sour, and later today and tonight it promises to rain. I’ve still got a few holes in the front of the boat, so I’ll need to cover those with garbage bags or something for Tuesday, but then Wednesday and on through the weekend is supposed to be bright and sunny, so I should be able to get that job finished this coming weekend.

Just in time, too – coming up, I have a speaking gig on cloud computing at the Open Web Vancouver conference, an open offer of a live-pa set in Victoria, a possible second live-pa set at a music festival out on Texada Island (plus I can sail there!), and a third offer of an acoustic live set over on Vancouver Island. Furthermore I have a lovely young lady coming up from Michigan for a ten-day epic sailing adventure in June, a hacker conference in Washington the weekend after that, and I am putting together a live electronic music show on the only weekend in July without a three-day outdoor festival to go to. It never stops!

I have to pick and choose between the musical bookings, because I frankly don’t know how much free time I’ll have to practice up between then and now – but it’s all very flattering nonetheless. 🙂 Public appearances come with a thrill of adventure, but also with a dark sense of foreboding which drives me to work much harder on my music and performance so that I don’t suck. It’s one thing to play badly in your living room, it’s another thing entirely to play badly in front of hundreds of people!

Fake Monday

Today is Tuesday, but it’s technically the start of the week since yesterday was Victoria Day, a statutory holiday here in Canada.

The holiday long weekend was gorgeous. I technically took Friday off of work also, so it was a four-day weekend full of sunny boat repair work. I got so much done! Where to begin…

Thursday night I went out to the Anza Club to catch a show – Tarran the Tailor was playing upstairs. Excellent time, great music as usual – afterwards I biked back to my rowboat, but as I approached I noticed a couple of bicycles abandoned at the top of the dock ramp. As I arrived, I found three 20-something folks sitting in my boat, drinking bourbon – they mistook me for a fellow Midnight Mass rider and invited me to join them. As I explained that I was actually there to kick them out of my boat and go home, they were shocked and extremely apologetic, but really, it’s not like they were hurting anything. The boat is always locked up with a padlock, and there’s nothing left in it to steal. I mean, if they’d thrown my oars in the water or tried to damage the boat in some way, it would have gone much more sourly – but as it was, they were nice enough folks, geeks even. We exchanged names and URLs, so Adam, Andrew and Rebecca, if you’re reading this, feel free to drop me a line. 🙂

Friday and Saturday I got up at 8am and worked hard on the boat – I finished a bunch of epoxy work, got hinges onto all the storage hatches finally, and made progress in getting the hinges and hasps onto the cabin hatches – that project still needs more work, of course, but the end is finally in sight. I spent a bunch of time in the engine compartment working to get the kill switch in place, and finally succeeded – but when I went to test it, it didn’t work, and in fact I’ve apparently damaged the cable to the point that I need to go and find a new one. Boo – at least now, after two visits to the marine store and one visit to Canadian Tire, I know that the cable is called a ‘utility cable’ and that I should be able to get a new one from LloydCo Auto Parts.

I also removed the traveler on Friday – ie the seven-foot-long pulleys-on-rails thing that the boom attaches to – so that I could fix a few leaks in the bedding hardware. The leaks were directly over the stove, which meant that every time it rained I’d have to use steel wool on the cast iron stove grill again to get rid of the big patch of resulting rust. The leak had, over time, caused some of the roof to rot; this led to the first cutting of a large hole in the boat roof, and the bulk of the 1/4″ of sawdust that covers everything in the galley at the moment. The hole is patched, the surface is fiberglassed, sanded, faired perfectly with epoxy and fairing compound, and the traveler is now ready to be rebedded – perhaps this afternoon, if the weather clears up for a while.

Sunday I had a few guests over helping me work on the boat – it seems unfortunately that adding more people to a project doesn’t necessarily make the project go any quicker. Still, it was nice to have the company, and a few projects got nailed down properly – though when I removed the trampolines to fix a few small cosmetic problems on the center bow of the boat, we discovered a few patches of rot that quickly grew into a huge seven-foot hole in the boat. The rot wasn’t structural, which was a relief, but all that wood still needed to be replaced. I got a bunch of the wood in, but then Sunday was mostly rainy, so I had to cover the work site with tarps and pray for the best, spending the day curled up, drinking rum and watching movies with a friend. Sunday night was more rain and a lot more wind, which picked up the tarps and blew a cold wind through the boat, though as far as I can tell not much rain got in. It’s supposed to be rainy today and tomorrow, but then it’s supposed to be calm and sunny for another five or so days in a row, so this coming weekend I should be able to completely nail down the problems in the bow, and be done with it for the foreseeable future.

Today, however, I’m back to the day job. I’m working to figure out why the bottleneck in our EC2 migration appears to be network traffic – the frontend webservers seem to handle my load testing without a hiccup, but the database server spikes to a load of over 50, even though it’s an “extra large” EC2 instance. It doesn’t appear to be file I/O wait, nor a lack of CPU time, so I’m stuck. I’m not sure what I can do about that – I’ve always been under the assumption that network bandwidth between EC2 instances would be incredible, seeing as they’re virtual instances on more or less the same physical hardware. This week I have to solve the problem, but I’m not sure how just yet.

There’s still a few holes in the boat. I still don’t have clean water, though that’s just a matter of time – a reasonable amount of time actually, because filling the tanks takes a good fifteen minutes, then the bleach should be left in for an hour or so, then fifteen minutes to empty the tanks, then fifteen minutes to refill, fifteen minutes to empty, fifteen minutes to refill, fifteen minutes to empty, and finally a final refill. The traveler is still sitting a few feet away from where it should be mounted, and I still have more research to do on epoxy compounds before I can put the hatch doors properly back on the boat. The work is tiring, but very fulfilling, and a few long days of working in the sun have topped up my stores of vitamin D and left me with a positive outlook and a fantastic tan.

I’ll Never Stop, Nancy.

Argh.

I spent a gorgeous weekend working on the boat, a stupid grin on my face most of the time. The end results are a few less fiberglass problems, a nagging cough from the sanding dust that got past my dust mask, a mild sunburn in the middle of my back, two more banged-up fingers, one of which is looking a little bit infected, and a hangover.

The boat is a disaster right now though, with every powertool I own littering the kitchen, a sink full of dirty dishes and screws and bolts and wires on every flat surface. I really need to spend some time cleaning up, but frankly I don’t know when that’s going to happen.

This morning it’s back to banging my head against the bulkhead – hey, maybe that’s the source of the name ‘bulkhead’? I slept well, but when it got light outside I was awake. I lay there for a long while, convincing myself that while it must already be 10am, with my work schedule I could afford to stay in bed until 11am or so… but then my pager went off with a work emergency. My laptop batteries were low, so staying in bed only lasted a few minutes before I had to get up, dress, and switch to the aft cabin (ie, walk out through the pouring rain). On my way out the door I grabbed my cellphone to check the time: 7:15am. I guess my internal clock needs some adjustment.

It was so cold this morning! I could see my breath, so I decided that it was probably time to tackle the stove – and at around 10am I rolled up my sleeves and dove in to clean it out with a stiff wire brush. Of course, burning sooty for the past week or so hasn’t done it any favours, and soon there was a three-inch deep pile of soot in the bottom of the burner. This is when I was struck with a rare moment of genius: I have a generator now, and so I can use the little shop vac that came with the boat!

Well, it worked, and I was able to suck up the soot just fine – but since it’s a shop vac there’s not really a filter, per se, and so about a third of the soot was promptly blown out the other side of the shop vac, all over the inside of the cabin. The second I noticed this, I put the motor portion of the shop vac outside, so I could continue cleaning out the stove, but it just blew soot all over the cockpit instead. You thought my boat was dirty before? Let me tell you, it was positively sparkling compared to now.

For now I’ve given up on the stove, and am returning to work. I went to Canadian Tire and picked up a decent single-burner propane camping stove instead, and proceeded to make coffee in under five minutes instead of an hour. It’s much warmer out, and I’m somewhat dry, so my mood is infinitely better, but damn, what a crappy morning! Best part: it’s supposed to stay rainy all week again. :/

Argh.

Ok, well, it’s day… six? I guess. Day six of officially living on the boat fulltime. This is the first day with any doubts.

Of *course* it’s raining, and it’s grey and cold outside, just like yesterday. It’s also very windy out, with gale warnings last night that had me keeping an eye on my GPS long into the night. Furthermore I haven’t had any coffee for two days, because my water supply has somehow become tainted, and my stove isn’t working properly.

The water I suspect I may have had a hand in. On Saturday I noticed that an old can of paint that came with the boat was leaking from the bottom seal. The paint was “bottom paint”, for painting the underwater portion of the boat, and as such is very nasty stuff, full of heavy metals. The paint was black, but whatever was leaking out of the bottom of the can was sticky and green, and made a big mess on the carpet – given the chemicals involved, this was the very definition of “toxic waste”! When I went to clean it up (wearing heavy protective gloves, removing and throwing out the carpet, scraping the underfloor with a scraper, and laying down new carpet), I noticed that it had also leaked through the floorboards and into the bilge, where it had pooled in a small corner. Lucky for me – if the leak had been two inches to the right, it would have gone into an extremely difficult place to clean. As it was though it was contained to a small area, and so I took up the floorboards, stood on the water tank, and cleaned up the toxic waste.

As I stood on it, the tank flexed a little, though nothing terrible – the tanks are made of heavy white plastic and bulge a bit when they’re full. I suspect however that this flexing is why my water now has a distinct yellow tinge. I don’t really know what to do about this, besides flush the tanks and start fresh, and to do that I need to pull the anchor and head up the creek to the filling station. I’m guessing there might be something I could do involving bleach? WestMarine sells some kind of water tank freshener stuff, but it’s pretty pricy and who knows what it actually is. I think I’m going to try adding 1/4 cup of bleach to the tanks, fill them, flush them out, then fill them again and see what that does.

The stove I think I may have figured out – it’s been throwing a lot less heat lately and a lot more soot, but I managed to find a manual for it online and it appears that it’s pretty much half poorly configured and half me not knowing how to use it properly. There’s a fan (unconnected of course) on the bottom of the stove that needs to be powered up in order for the burner to get the right draft needed to vaporize the diesel fuel, and right now it’s just not getting that draft. I’m thinking that probably what’s happened is that the fan not being on has caused the stove to produce more soot, which has clogged the air intake, causing the stove to produce even *more* soot. I think all it will need is a good cleaning and for the wiring to be set up to provide power for the fan, but man. Have you ever touched diesel soot? That stuff is black as night, and since it’s oil-based you need soap and water to get it off of you – no amount of rubbing on your pants will suffice. I do not look forward to being up to my elbow in the stuff, but if it means I can have a hot dinner then it must be done.

…but not today.

God. Just a constant barrage of new, tangible problems. In one way it’s really nice to have to use not only my brain to diagnose problems and work out solutions, but also to get my hands dirty actually implementing those solutions. Still, it’s dirty, difficult work, and my hands are not only dirty but scraped, cut, bruised, bandaged, rough and sore.

I’ve already done so much to make the boat a better place to live, but there’s still *so* much more to do! In order of priority:

Figure out what’s up with the water. Do I need new tanks? Hope not, apparently tanks are expensive, like >$200 each. :/

Figure out what’s up with the stove. Can I fix it myself, or do I need a repair guy? Apparently the company that made the stove is in Coquitlam, so assuming they still exist I should be able to get someone out here if I need to.

Gut and rebuild the abysmal electrical system. This means both dropping another $1000 on batteries, possibly yet *another* $1000 on a charge management system (one that will allow me to eventually add photovoltaics to the system), ripping out every last bit of the current wiring and re-doing it all to my spec.

While I’m on the wiring tip – I’ve purchased some LED lighting that works *really* well, but I have yet to find fixtures that have switches on them, so for now those lights sit in their boxes unloved. They’re awesome though, they’re the exact same size as typical halogen lighting and they’re a “warm” yellowish light that doesn’t at all feel like typical LED lighting. Very impressed! They were $20/per bulb at the electronics supply store, but compared to $185/per (!!!) for fixtures with similar bulbs at West Marine, I’m pretty pleased.

Clean the boat – can’t believe I haven’t done this yet, actually. I need to borrow a friend’s power washer, and from that I’ll determine if I actually need to purchase a small one of my own.

Finish repairing the fiberglass problems on the main deck – the more I finish, the more I find. They’re not huge, but they do need attention, and I don’t really feel like painting the deck until the problems are all fixed. A couple of good, solid days of grinding and sanding and epoxy/fiberglass patching and sanding and patching and sanding and filling and sanding and priming and I’ll be done.

Paint the deck. This will mean a lot of taping off areas, laying down anti-skid paint, then the final coat of deck paint over top. I’ve been thinking of doing some different colors on the horizontal areas; we’ll see when the time comes.

Purchase and install a macerator pump. Basically, it’s a pump that takes all the shit (literally) in the holding tank, runs it through a set of stainless steel teeth to chop it into fine bits, and pumps it out into the ocean. This is illegal in False Creek or any other public harbour, but totally fair game out on the open ocean – and sure beats having to pump out the tank every week or so.

Pull the boat out of the water ($400 or so) and paint the bottom – this will take a few days, and a few more hundred dollars, but needs to be done. I’m just praying that I don’t find any soft spots in the hull, because that would signify rot, and that would be very bad and cost even more to fix.

Argh. On top of all the boat work, I’ve got just over a month to come up with and practice a 45-minute talk on cloud computing for the Open Web Vancouver conference. I’m pretty confident that I can be educational and entertaining for 45 minutes, but it will still mean a lot of work to get it all together, make slides, practice, etc.

Anyhow. The stove is lit, and I’ve got some bottled water in the stovetop percolator – in an hour or so I should have coffee. Today I have to continue working on porting one of the gossip sites into the clouds – I’ve committed to having it up and running by Wednesday night, and I don’t want to blow any more deadlines, so back to work I go.

Constant Hustle

God. Seriously.

It’s Tuesday, and I have two more days to get everything out of my house and have it ready for the new folks to move in. There’s still so much to do!

This week has been very expensive – I thought last week was pricy, what with the purchase of the $1700 generator (which, by the way, seems to be somewhat overkill for my needs! I probably could have gotten away just fine with the 1000w version instead of the 2000w – oh well, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have too much power), but this week has had four >$100 trips to Canadian Tire and two >$100 trips to the boating store so far! Worse yet, there’s no end in sight, as I’ve still got to completely overhaul the electrical system, finish repairing all the fiberglass problems on the deck, and then hopefully I’ll have time to start making the interior look a little more like a home and less like a hunting camp.

One nice thing though – I realized yesterday as I was loading in some groceries that my nomadship (heh) is nearly complete. I’ve got canned and dried food to last a month, two months if I really had to stretch it. All the fuel tanks are full, and there’s another hundred liters of diesel in jerry cans in the amas. The water tanks are full too, giving me over a hundred liters of potable water – all I’m really lacking for an extended absence is a source of fresh protein (ie fish or meat). Not that I really *need* to be ready for any sort of extended absence… but given the econopocalypse, impending west coast earthquake, swine flu, etc, it’s nice to know.

I don’t know if I mentioned, but the second time we had the boat out, the binnacle (thingy that sticks out of the deck like a podium that the steering wheel attaches to) pulled out the deck, exposing poor workmanship – don’t attach important things with short woodscrews! – and a small patch of rot that I’ll eventually have to tend to. I got around to fixing that yesterday, pulling the binnacle completely off and re-attaching it securely to the deck with long bolts and wide washers. When I went to reconnect the steering, however, I noticed a bunch of slack in the lines. I called Bill, the guy who sold me the boat, and asked what he thought of that.

Well, turns out one of the steering lines had slipped from a turning block. That turning block happened to be deep in the stern of the boat, reachable through an access panel, but still at the end of arm’s reach. I got to spend the next hour and a half up to my shoulder in the wall of the salon, trying to free a thick steel cable from the pulley it had fouled. Waaaay fun.

Seriously, every day something breaks on the boat, and I have to learn how to fix it. Sooner or later I’m going to know every square inch of her. In some ways I growl about this, as I look at weekend sailors with their gorgeous, perfectly-functioning boats, but in a much stronger way I know that this is the universe’s way of ensuring that the boat becomes truly mine. It is a series of tests, and as I complete each one I feel stronger for having done so.

Anyhow. Just to add to the stress, I’ve been accepted to speak at Open Web Vancouver, a big web conference in June. I’ve never actually spoken at a conference before, so we’ll see how that works out…