I've been working on odd clean-up jobs in between doing Mabrouka's various improvements. One that had been ignored too long was this year's spring cleaning of the house top, deck, and hull topsides. The Pacific Northwest climate is very conducive to growing green things on boats. Most of them start out as some version of slime whose spores have emigrated from the area's multitudinous plants and trees. Drifting in on rain and on wind, they establish refugee camps in the grain of unvarnished teak and in the microscopic pores of oxidized fiberglass and flaking paint, soon oozing out in subtle shades of brown and green. Left long enough to its own devices, the ooze will blanket an entire boat.
Though Mabrouka's crop had mostly developed only into a general haze that might make you squint to see her as if through a Chinese urban smog, it was beginning to hang in discrete waterfalls in a few chronically moist spots. Mabrouka, having been in need of a paint job for many years, has pores that are MACROscopic, so Mother Nature has a field day recruiting her to join Puget Sound's rain forest. Believe me, it's possible. I've actually seen boats that have been neglected long enough to have mushrooms growing from their teak. It's truly heartbreaking to see!
Even though I've taken one of those green, scrubby-paddy-kinda-thingies to the house top now and then, the one really effective cleaning method is a power washer. Without one of my own, I am subject to the generosity of more well-endowed neighbors for access to one of these wonderful devices. While waiting for my dock mate to borrow one from a friend of his, then complicitely looking the other way while I absconded with it, a stray turned up at the dumpster the other day. Heck! It looked intact, lacking only one leg and missing a patch of fur here and there, so I walked it down to Mabrouka and hooked it up for a test run. Ta da! It worked.
Over a period of about a week I spent three or four blasting sessions getting Mabrouka all prettied up! That is, until one day when my spraying zen was disturbed by that metallic smell of an electrical fire wafting by. I stood up and surveyed the marina around me. No flames. No smoke. I stuck my nose down into Mabrouka's salon. No flames. No smoke. The aroma drifted away on the breeze. Back to spraying, the smell reappeared in a few minutes. This time I happened to look over at the power washer and saw curls of smoke drifting out of the case.
Dang it! If it could have only lasted two or three more hours I would have been done. So, the machine was sent back up to the dumpster, only inside it this time rather than next to it. Its untimely (though not necessarily early) demise left about ten feet of deck and the whole port side of the boat looking scruffy. At least it was on the side away from the dock.
A couple of days later I borrowed Len Hodges' machine and knocked off the rest of the job. This required turning Mabrouka around in the slip so I wouldn't have to walk on water to blast the season's slime off the port side. That was an adventure in itself with the engine out of commission, but was accomplished with the help of a couple of neighbors. Now Mabrouka's all beautiful again, lacking only (!?!) paint and varnish. The earliest THAT might happen is next year in Mexico.