Kaimusailing

I recovered from the strange affliction. It may have been a summer flu brought on by a free case of champagne-like wine product. The night before setting out to sail I had consumed a bottle of it. The plan is to take off again as soon as a few minor details are corrected. Spice in the kitchen. Scrape the hulls to remove a thick layer of fresh water mussels.
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The boatbuilding scheme is weighted against the amateur home builder. It starts out as a spark of an idea, “Hey, I can build one of those boats right here in the backyard!”. The early enthusiasm explodes when the building plans arrive. Plans, plans to buy lumber and materials, planning the building space, then commencing the work. The adverse weight is how fast the progress seems in the beginning when the hulls are built and the large pieces are constructed. The small details begin to show that the real weight of the project is at the end, getting the small stuff sorted out. Keeping a boat simple helps keep the details simple and fewer of them. Kaimu is not a simple boat, but all the nifty ideas have to be sorted out, otherwise a smaller simple boat would have made more sense.
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The hull scraping took two days and wasn't as bad as expected. The fresh water mussels are rampant this year. Now the mussels are gone and the swallows are at bay, still perching on the genoa sheets, but not building nests, yet.
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I was itching to take the boat out and see what she would do with the hulls cleaned. It looked like a day of north winds followed by a day of south winds would permit a nice broad reaching tour of the bay, but then the forecast changed to all south. We could wait and tackle some more boatwork.
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The plan was to epoxy the oak planked sole to eliminate some loose planks and also use a graphite pigmented epoxy to highlight the seams and screw holes. It would take a few days because several coats of epoxy had to be applied. Also faux screw holes were drilled to allow the epoxy to saturate the bottoms of the planks and the substrate. After it cured, the real screws used for repair of some of the planks were removed, and the graphite mix was made using 10 per cent graphite with the regular epoxy mix. It comes out like black paint. The seams between planks and ends of planks were painted generously and the brush was used to wipe the black mixture into the cracks and screw holes. It might take several applications to completely seal the planks.
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I could do a couple of hours work, then wait till the next day for the epoxy to cure. I could check on the VHF for the weather to see if I had to move the boat or worry about rain. The local marina has wifi available and their password is simple, once you know it. I could get on the internet, albeit slow and intermittent.
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There was a song, “Ocean Gypsy”, that I looked for on the internet and found it. Live at Carnegie Hall. There were other songs that I couldn't find on the internet from live performances at Carnegie Hall. It has great acoustics. I guess that just about everything that happens there is recorded. Just not on the internet.
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You can probably get the internet at any legitimate port of call. You can get it at home. You can't get the ospreys and swallows of the Bodkin Inlet on your internet at home. You have to come down to the water and hang out there. Kayaking is good. It's not the same as the outdoor life tv productions where you get close up to the wildlife.
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Watching things on the internet or tv is OK, but I've found it's better to be there first hand one time, then the tv show is in proper perspective. If you've been out at sea, a show like “Deadliest Catch” can't fool you with some trick editing. You know what seas look like and how they look in a photograph. On tv it is like a photograph, so if it looks awesome, it is probably a bit worse than that. When I was able to take a picture of an awesome wave overtaking Kaimu, it turned out to be a yawner when I looked at it later. It's hard to capture waves and wind in a way that is comparable to what is there before you in real life.
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So, you have to get down to the ocean and experience it in real life.
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The news from Hawaii was pretty bad. They got a foot of rain on the Big Island. I called my brother who was wise enough to have a generator to keep his household going. Trees had been blown down crushing houses and cars, slamming down on power lines. Power out for two weeks or so. The papaya plantations had their papaya trees knocked over and the coffe plantations had flash floods. Not a good idea to get down to the ocean there. The storm surge brought huge waves onto the Puna shores.
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Webb Chiles has reached Tonga, but no report from him yet. He's avoided the Hawaiian hurricanes.
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Cornelia Marie sent pictures of when I was up the mast with the electric bosun's chair. This is one of them. Sailblogs shrinks everything to 400 pixels wide, so I'm cropping and shrinking more portrait than landscape. You can see the batteries at the end of the chair and how safe and secure it is.