On Monday (July 30) we travelled about 1/2 mile North to the South Bay Boat Yard to have Aurora hauled for painting and her two year survey/warranty check-out. We are a dinky boat compared to some of the mega yachts propped up for painting or other services (i.e. Larry Elison's yacht!). They're going to sand her down and put two coats of new paint--you know that phenomenon of taking your car for "just an oil change" and it turns into a major reworking of some major and VERY crucial system.......yeah. The surveyor was there and had some good insights about what the condition of the bottom paint was and we did decide to do the complete job. We thought about having it done in Mexico but wanted to start out clean. Any subsequent paint jobs should be much more reasonable. For a (very short) while we visualized hand-sanding that very big expanse, and that helped us decide!

The process of taking a 14.5 ton boat out of the water is impressive. There's a tremendous spider-like thing that travels out to stradle the slip that the boat is in, two canvas straps slip under the belly and then they begin to haul it out. Its then walked to a spot in the yard where the keel is set down onto a board and then ridiculouisly spindley struts are put in place to hold it while all the work is done.

Jim and I spent the rest of Monday inside the boat--I was changing out some lights under the dodger and he was drilling down into the deck to install some "stoppers" for preventers. We really like doing work on the boat--both of us like this aspect of boat ownership, it was a very fulfilling day!

Not too much longer until Jim gives notice of his retirement, August 16th is the day he'll tell them! In the meantime we'll keep getting her ready to take off on the 29th of October.