We've finally started to go through Picaroons bottom drawer, although being a boat that should read lazarette, of course, which is seadog speak for big cavernous holes beneath the deck in the back end of the good ship Picaroon. This was a job that we thought we would do in the first couple of weeks of coming aboard, but as you know, other little problems kept cropping up, so not being a priority it has taken till now to get round to it.
Now sailing can be dangerous; there are rocks and coral reefs that lurk beneath the waves, and storms that can rage above, all conspiring to sink you if you're not careful. These are the hazards that us seadogs have to come to terms with as we adventure the globe, although we've still to get out of Salinas Bay, but that's as maybe. So back to the lazarette.
Once we had decanted the contents onto the deck we started to pick through what we had sitting underneath where we spend most of our time in the evenings, sipping wine and playing our ukes'. Tucked away beneath our bottoms it seemed we had enough hazardous and volatile chemical concoctions to start a small war, if not a very large fire. Inside grubby ziplock bags sit corroding cans of noxious fluids, all of which have warning labels that declare stuff like 'This product is inherently unsafe and cannot be made safe', another reads 'DANGER! EXTREMLY FLAMMABEL LIQUID AND VAPOUR, MAY CAUSE FLASH FIRE. Wear a NOSH approved respirator, clean up carefully with a HEPA vacuum. Before you start find out how to protect yourself and your family by contacting the National Lead information hotline at 1-800-444 or log on to www.epa.gov/lead.'
I can only assume that the previous owner, who as you may remember was a rocket scientist, liked to take a walk on the wild-side, and tinkering around with dangerous stuff was just part of everyday life. Jackie just wants it off the boat.
Besides the hazardous stuff, there's assorted cans of oil, engine oil, gear oils, easing oils, adhesives, fillers, fuel additives, cans of thinners, masks, protective gloves etc. all encased in grimy old ziplock bags, some we'll keep just in case we figure out why we need them.
We also found the liferaft inside one of the lazarettes, which will be handy should we need to abandon ship one day. We decided to take it out and secure it somewhere on deck but getting this giant bag out of the hole it was in was almost impossible, as not only did it weigh a ton it was almost too big to get through the locker door. After about ten minutes of heaving and cursing we finally had it on deck. Probably a good job we did that now as, had we tried the same operation in a real emergency I think the liferaft would have gone down with the ship. We both feel better now it's on deck, where we'll secure it, and hope we never need to use it.
It's been a good week, we've now been through every cupboard and locker from stem to stern, and rationalised all the stuff we've discovered along the way. Jackie has it all now neatly catalogued in a little notebook, and although we're not sure what some of the spare parts are actually for, we now know more or less what's on board, which is a lot of stuff, that will come in handy. We found lots of sails, tri-sail, storm-sail, brand new, never been used, and a drifter, which according to Lynn and Larry Pardy is a must for light airs sailing, although we've no idea how you use it we feel properly equipped to circumnavigate should we ever get out of Salinas Bay.