Kaimusailing

The issue of professional photography I ran into last post is probably not an issue. If people take public images off the internet and use them, why not? If you need a photographer to make an advertisement or shoot your wedding, certainly no internet photograph is going to work for you. The professional who has references and a good track record will fulfill your needs. No problem.
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There is also the issue of photography is too easy now, anyone can take a photo with their smartphone and there are many such photos posted up to the internet. Social media.
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This has been going on for some time. The photography industry has always tried to made it easier for anyone to take photographs. From the beginning when it was very difficult to take a photograph and process it, to now when you can take a photograph without knowing you did it, the chemical and technical aspects have been shoved aside, and now the question is: has this cheapened the photograph or lessened the role of the photographer? Another question is: Is photography art?
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What is artistry? If I take a photograph and you take a photograph, does one photograph exceed the other in artistry? Art is subjective, an elusive thing that can change very quickly. But there are some things that most people will exclaim as art. Random shots from a camera located in the wild and shooting whenever something moves can create an image that many would define as art. But who is the artist? The person who set the camera up and programmed it to shoot, or the engineer who created the camera that could do this?
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During the recent winter I was spending time listening to music and prowling websites. I came to appreciate Joni Mitchell who is now 74 years old and out of the picture, she is a true artist. She saw things and related them to us in an unfamiliar unique way, she interpreted life for us. Another musician, Lyle Mays, a keyboardist, looked to be a good search object to find some modern symphonic music. He is known as the keyboardist in Pat Metheney's band, but he also performs his own music and it is structured and complicated, like symphonic music. What I found was an online article at MOTU about the production of the Pat Metheney Group's album The Way Up. And then I had to go to You Tube to listen to the album and live performances of it, which didn't seem possible when they first wrote and recorded in studio.
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Creating things like photographs, songs, stories, or any other thing you can create is a measure of your psychological state. I notice I have some mood swings that can be correlated to when I have to go out and photograph things or cook up a storm or just hunker away, too worn out to do much else. But what is the norm, what is normal. I know that when I am reluctant to do any of the creative things, I am in a slump. I know I will be able to participate somewhere down the line. It is important to save photos, etc., when you are doing well so that you can look back and get a boost when you are feeling a brick wall in front of you and how to break through it.
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My work on the keel bottoms was interrupted by a bug that I thought was the flu, but it only lasted a couple of days. I began gathering my epoxy tools, some of which had been stowed away since the onset of the hurricane season. It took a while to set up a work station, a work table, drawers of epoxy supplies, plastic gloves, tongue depressors, chip brushes, calibrated syringes, new 3 gallon batch of epoxy, mixing bowls, halfmoon putty spreaders, bags of microballoons, milled fibers, and colloidal silica, and I ran across a few other tools that I had been looking for.
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The mixing bowls had to be scraped clean of old epoxy. I only found two of the halfmoon spreaders and one was cracked, so I made new ones. These are flat plastic that came from a rectangular kitty litter pail. The curved side of the halfmoon exactly matches the curvature of the round mixing bowls, the other edge is straight. To make them a bowl is placed upside down over the plastic and the curve is marked with a sharpie pen. The spreader is cut from the plastic with scissors, then the edges are cleaned up with the belt sander and a knife to remove any shreds left on the edge. These work great with the round mixing bowls, the round edge can scoop out all of the epoxy mix, and the straight edge allows nice troweled application to the repair.
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The next day I did the task of priming any bare patches of wood. I mixed 30 ml. batches of epoxy. The small batches seems like a time waster, but another worker in the boatyard also took advantage of this fine weather mixed a big batch of epoxy and had it coalesce into a steaming lump. Large batches go off quicker, and if you're like me, you can't estimate how much you will need, so an overly large batch goes off and you have to throw the rest away, but small mixes are completely used up before they harden. It takes maybe 5 minutes to mix a new little batch and thoroughly mix it before applying.
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I'm just getting started, there is glass work to do, and that can be intimidating. Over the years I have run into very complicated epoxy repairs that needed a flow chart of work to be done, and then I had to make myself refer to it, or else, a missed step would be a disaster. So, I agonize about this current project, how to restore my keels and replace missing glass laminations, also how to repair the hull damage.
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After the initial coating of bare wood with raw epoxy I used my "glue hard" mix to go over any cracks in the keel so that the result would be a solid unbroken substrate for any fairing or glass work later. ":Glue Hard" is epoxy mixed with a filler made of colloidal silica and glass mill end fibers. They say to use "some" fibers in the mix, but that turned out to be a very sparse ratio, I use a 20 percent ratio of glass to silica. You can go a lot less, but for me the mix will lose it's spreadability with a higher glass content, and who knows what loss of strength there is with lower glass content.
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The next step was to sand the epoxy after it set up, then new batches of 50/50 microballoons and colloidal silica were troweled into the bigger depressions where the jetty had gouged out the keels. Now the keels would resemble their former shape but needed glass rovings and fairing before the bottom paint could go on.
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I ran across another sailing vblog on you tube at:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urGIpvxmQCY
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The sailor's name is James and he is sailing a Lock Crowther Spindrift 37 catamaran, a very nice design. Unfortunately most of the dozen or so entries in this vblog show a lot of damage and thus repair of the boat. There is a stream of attractive female sailors joining as crew and lots of underwater and some drone videos. James spearfishes and explores wrecks. The Spindrift 37 was an advanced design for its time and performance oriented. Crowther was also the designer for the first Katana catamarans which were also performance oriented.
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Some of the repairs of the Spindrift remind me of my work on Kaimu. I can't fault that captain for damaging his boat when I have done the same, maybe worse, to my boat. I don't think the Spindrift would have survived striking the jetty at St Marys Entrance. It looks like its damage happened in shoal water, anchoring too close to shore, hitting a reef, and maybe some components failing due to age. The Spindrift is 30 years old.
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I had waited 3 weeks for a replacement battery charger for the drone and it finally arrived. After about 5 minutes of charging the batteries that came with it, the charger smoked and died. Unbelievable. Of course there is warranty for such a quick failure and I had to photograph the charger's circuit board and email it to the vendor who is in China. Maybe it will be another 3 week wait.