Category: Boat Repairs/Maintenance

Work On The Boat

Back To The Grind

Well, things progress.

I mean, they could be progressing smoother, of course – I still don’t have a tenant lined up to move into the apartment, and April 1st draws ever closer. I’ve had a few people in to look at the place, but twice now people have come by, looked, told me they’d get back to me in a few hours and never bothered to call back. Rude!

The boat progresses quickly – I’ve posted a few pictures of the progress on my other website, of the aft cabin and a few pics of the outside. She still needs a lot of work, but the more I work on her, the more I realize that all of the work is well within my abilities – to quote Trent, “it’s not rocket surgery!” I’m actually quite enjoying learning about epoxy and fiberglass, and the finished product is immediately gratifying; fix a leak, and water stops coming in. Boosh!

I was hoping to make it out to the boat this week to do a bit more on it, but I’ve managed to score a free pass to the CanSecWest network security conference here in town. I can’t really spare the time off work, but given that a conference pass costs $1700 for the three days, I could also argue that I can’t afford not to go. I read an article yesterday that had a quote from Benjamin Franklin; “If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.”

The apartment is slowly emptying – more and more furniture is going away, and decisions are being made with regards to the layout of storage in the boat. I’ve decided that the starboard forecabin bunk is going to have to be sacrificed in order to make room for closet space; that’s not such a bad thing though, as it’ll mean a “proper” closet can be made, as well as a lot of extra space for boxes and such.

Anyhow – back to work. This week’s task is to get the Evil Masters’ main website up and running in the Amazon cloud, and that means finishing up these i386 AWS AMI’s and building an x86_64 AMI for use as the database server and NFS server…

Birthday

Today, I turn 33 years old.

Not that that’s a big deal or anything, but when I look back over the growth of the last year, I think. My friend told me that age 33 is significant to the Japanese, in that it represents the passing from being a “young man” to just being a “man”, or the entrance into the “summer” years of your life.

I couldn’t find that on Wikipedia, but what I did find was that the Muslim faith believes that the dwellers of Heaven exist eternally in a state of being at age 33, and that Jesus was crucified at age 33.

Regardless, 33 is the year in which I shall move onto my boat. In fact, with any luck that’ll begin this weekend!

My mother and sister have outdone themselves, and clued into the fact that I am selling off or getting rid of most of my belongings, and as such I have no need for more birthday “stuff”. Instead, they both gave me gift cards for Canadian Tire, which is a mind-blowingly practical and useful gift. I have a list that I’ve been compiling for weeks of things that I need from Canadian Tire, and I’m sure the grand total will be many hundreds of dollars, so the gift cards certainly help!

Another friend offered me a wonderful gift, though I’m not sure it was intended as a birthday thing – a free entry into a major security conference here in town later this month. Awesome! I was really interested in going to the conference, but frankly there was no way I’d be able to afford the $1700 entry fee. I’ll definitely be reporting more about the conference as I attend.

Anyhow – no big plans for birthday night. I have kung-fu at 7pm, then will probably meet up with some friends for sushi at 9:30pm, but other than that, nothing. *shrug*. Such is the downside of having your birthday on a Wednesday, I guess.

Fiberglass

So Tuesday I went back out to White Rock to work on the boat again. This time, Bill and I spent the day grinding down various problems in the fiberglass of the deck and removing the nasty huge “lifting bridles” (huge 6″ chunks of steel sticking out of the deck for use lifting the boat up with a crane, almost completely useless since cranes have lifting straps, and a great place to stub your toe). I actually had a really nice time – the work is far easier than I expected, and even – dare I say it? – fun. The process goes something like this:

  • find a place on deck where the fiberglass is cracked or chipped, exposing the wood underneath. this usually constitutes a leak into the cabin, and will lead to rotting of the wood if left unchecked for too long.
  • grind down the area about an inch around the crack, all the way along. clean up all the dust.
  • paint the newly-ground section with epoxy, and lay down a roughly-sized strip of fiberglass matte. paint more epoxy over top of the matte, soaking it into the deck.
  • wait four or six hours for the epoxy to cure.

That’s where we’re at currently – we’ve fixed almost all the major problems on the deck, leaving just the rebedding of the traveler and some kind of issue with the main bow. The next steps are to add fairing compound, then sand it all down, and then paint the whole thing. Bill is teaching me as we go, and I am an eager student. I’m going back out on Tuesday, weather permitting, to do another four or six hours of work on her, and by then hopefully she’ll be tight as a drum and ready to be moved onto!

Next step: figuring out the toilet. It appears there’s a Y-valve that lets you select between flushing straight-into-the-ocean or into a holding tank, but there doesn’t appear to be a macerator pump. If that’s the case, the only way to empty the holding tank will be to use a pumpout service, which can get pricy pretty quick.

Always More Work

I spent all day Saturday on the boat, sailing around White Rock. It was eye-opening; a lot of the things that I’ve been taking for granted will need a re-think.

For instance, there was a lot more mildew than I remembered. Mostly this was because there was a lot more *water* than I remembered, due in part to the massive snowfalls of the past two months. I think a lot of the mildew will be easily taken care of with Tilex and some elbow grease, but it’s certainly changed my plans with regards to what can and what can’t immediately move aboard! I’ve packed all my sci-fi novels (well, “all” meaning “those that have survived the massive culling”) into a cardboard box, assuming that I would be moving the books aboard, unpacking them, and getting rid of the cardboard box. As it is, I’ll definitely want to keep the books in some kind of plastic tub for at least the first little while, while I track down and eradicate the leaks in the roof.

Frankly there was a lot more water than I expected – I know, that doesn’t seem like rocket science, but seriously – under one of the bunks there was a good two inches of water pooled up! That’s just not acceptable – at least the water is coming in from the roof, and not from the hull, but with Vancouver’s weather patterns I get to look forward to living in a state of perpetual damp for the next few months. Part of my original plan involved bringing my main synthesizer onto the boat, but now that I’ve seen the reality of the water situation, the synth’s soft nylon travel case seems woefully inadequate.

There’s certainly a lot of little fixes she needs – the fiberglass is cracked in quite a few places on the deck, and each place will need to be ground out and new fiberglass laid in and epoxied into place, then sanded and eventually painted. Bill, the current owner, assures me that the work is easy, just time consuming, and that she’ll be a beautiful vessel once the work is complete.

All that being said, sailing was glorious! She’s a huge boat, but she’s in no way unweildy – she’s fast and agile. I’d go so far as to call her downright nimble! We hit eight knots in just over twelve knots of wind; almost unheard of for a monohull, but no problem for my trimaran. The best part was leaving my coffee cup on the cabin roof while we hit eight knots, with no problem – a monohull would have been heeled over at four knots, spilling the coffee, but she stayed perfectly level the entire day. 😀

Tomorrow it’s back out to White Rock to spend another full day banging away at her; hopefully we’ll get some of the fiberglass repairs attended to, but I’ll be happy just to learn more about her systems and get her better ready to be my new home.

Argh!

I need to escape the house more often.

Seriously, it’s turning out that my “22h/week” job actually means sitting in front of my computer 40-50 hours a week, but only actually working on “work” for twenty or so hours. It certainly doesn’t help that the crazy winter weather has started – well, winter in Vancouver, that is, which means it has begun to rain and won’t let up until – oh, May or so.

Well – let’s just do an update, then. Still working for the media company, still mostly doing crazy celebrity gossip server admin stuff. Still living in the basement. Currently in negotiations to purchase a large sailboat…

Yeah, that’s right. I won’t give *too* many details, just in case I might jinx the whole thing, but here’s what I will tell you:

  • She’s big. Really big. Like, sleeps six people comfortably, but could potentially carry a lot more.
  • She’s in pretty rough shape. She’ll need a looooot of work before she looks as pretty as she can, but 90% of the work is scraping, sanding and painting.

My intention is to continue to negotiate the sale, to see if I can get the price down to something semi-reasonable. If everything works out, hopefully by the end of the year I’ll be moving out of my basement and onto a sailboat!

The downside is that there are a lot of hurdles – for instance, while she’s got a stove and a toilet, she doesn’t have a shower or a refrigerator. The shower can be retrofitted without too much work – there’s space for one – but the fridge is a bigger problem. Fridges consume a *lot* of electricity, which, on a boat, is a big deal. She does have an icebox though, and really, refrigerators on sailboats are kind of a new invention anyway, they’ve only really been possible for the past ten years or so. Using an icebox will be a shift in thinking, but one that I won’t really have to worry about for at least the next few months – I can keep things nice and cool just by putting them in a cooler outdoors.

Speaking of which, one might question the wisdom of moving onto a sailboat right at the start of winter. Well, rightly so – boats aren’t exactly known for their insular capacity. One might even consider them downright cold – but wait! This *particular* vessel was used as a live-aboard in Alaska for the past few years! She’s got dual diesel furnaces, fore and aft, and she’s been insulated against the bitter cold of the Alaskan winter. Actually though, I think I’ll probably have to rip out all the insulation and repaint her, but I’m quite looking forward to the work.

I’ve been taking a CYA (Canadian Yachting Association) Coastal Navigation class from the same guys that held the CYA Basic Cruising course I took over the summer. It’s been excellent, I highly recommend it – if you want details, feel free to email me and I’ll fill you in. The course is teaching me all about using charts and compasses and navigating the waters of the Georgia Straight – one thing the teacher said that I found particularly interesting was that the Straight (and surrounding waters) contain practically every kind of cruising waters that you’re likely to encounter anywhere in the world – if you learn to cruise here in British Columbia, you can pretty much cruise anywhere.

Anyhow – batteries are running low, and I suspect so is my welcome. I’m typing this in ‘Re-Entry’, a wicked little espresso place on Main Street. Time to pack up and go back out into the pouring rain…