PMA-Positive Mental Attitude--is gone!
27 June 2016 | Power Boats yard, Trinidad
Bill/a sunny day!
It's now Saturday and we have a day with no workmen on board. It also has an 80% chance of rain. We didn't wait long to get started on todays projects. The 0800 radio net was short as there was no moderator so I just got on and gave our weather forecast. The same as it's been for a week. Rain every day by late morning through the middle of the afternoon.
We grabbed a bunch of tools and the granny bars and headed for the front deck. With bolts, screwdrivers, lanocoat(to lube the ends of each bolt), and a tube of 3M 4200 caulk(nasty stuff)plus the granny bars we were in business. Tracy held them upside down so I could squeeze the handle of the caulk gun and we put a nice bead all over the base of the platform on bars. We lined them up with the holes and I slowly screwed them down, pushing some of the caulk out around the edges. We didn't screw them tight as I wanted to make sure there was a nice bed of caulk under each leg. Port side done, we headed for the starboard side and repeated the process. Unfortunately, this is where the job went south. In went the bolts balancing the pressure on the base. As we got to the last bolt, it went in and didn't hit a nut on the brackets inside the main cabin. It just hit the ceiling!!! The nut was gone!!! Now we had to tear out the ceiling on the opposite side of the cabin. I think "CRAP" was the appropriate expletive for that!! Oh, also, one of the nuts on the port side popped off it's bracket so we now need to get it rewelded. Like I said, this job was going south fast. We pushed to get the port side on as we were expecting Jason the woodworker any minute to work on the ceiling that we had already torn off. We got lucky and he showed up about 1100. He's done an amazing job on the new panel and is even setting it up so we can drop it if we need to in the future. But, before he showed up, we'd moved on to the next project. Once you open a can of the 4200, well you move as quickly as you can as it's a fast setting caulk not giving much time to wait.
We move on to the plate that covers the hole on the stern deck for the emergency tiller. We put the plate over the hole(about 6 inches across), drilled four new holes in the deck for the screws and covered the plate with more of the 4200. We lowered the plate into the hole and guess what---the holes we drilled in the deck didn't line up with the holes in the plate!! Off came the plate(can you see where this is going) and turned it upside down on a paper towel so we could find the holes we had drilled. When we turned over the plate, I, of course, got a bit of the 4200 on my hands. It then slowly began creeping up from there to the backs of my hands and any where else it wanted to go. It was the perfect example of sticky raised to a new level. Every thing I touched stuck to my hands--paper towels, screws, screw driver, etc. I had to use my other hand to get it off the first hand and all that did was move the 4200 to the other hand. In the end, we plopped the plate in place and I drilled three new holes as we got only one to line up and put in brass screws(brass plate) and lots of the 4200 bulged out the edges of the plate so it is well sealed. It took a while to clean up myself as well as the tools.
On to the big genoa sheet blocks on the side decks. Heres were it get even more fun. When the workers were working on the deck(taking off the teak and applying epoxy filler)they covered up the four holes needed for each block. I had to drill up from underneath to get new holes and have them line up with the holes on the blocks. It took some work but we got them to line up only to find that two of the bolts were too long since we had removed the teak pad the blocks sat on. I was off for the chandlery. Luckily the one here at Power Boats had what I needed so I was back nice and quickly so we could continue with the always wonderful 4200. I was below decks in the stern stateroom shoving the bolts up while Tracy tried lining them up with the holes in the blocks. Again, it took a bit of doing but we got that done at least as a dry fitting. Once we figured out the hole situation, we turned the blocks upside down and I put the 4200 on to each. Tracy positioned them over the holes while I again shoved the bolts up from below and she put on the washers and nuts and we tightened them down again not tight so the 4200 can make a good bed under each bracket.
It was at this time that Jason showed up and started in on the new ceiling. I was working in the stern stateroom taking more of the ceiling out in a place that I had taken part down alrady so we could get to the blocks bolts. When the workers had washed out the cockpit, water had come gushing out of the ceiling in the stern head(where I had taken down parts of the ceiling). We needed to find the hole in the cockpit. I took down more of the ceiling, cutting wires to the light in the head and the wires to the fan. Out came the panel and Tracy went back up to the cockpit and sprayed some water into one of the storage cubbies we have in the cockpit. Water poured out of a hole where the water is supposed to drain out of the cockpit but instead, it drains back inside the boat. Will these leaks never stop? As the leak was in the ceiling, I needed an epoxy putty I could shove in the hole. I was again off for Peakes chandlery for a special putty. We've carried a tube of it for years and what we had had already turned solid. We needed more. This stuff comes in a plastic tube. You pull out the putty, and cut off what you need and mash it with your fingers. The outside is the filler and the inside is the hardener. Once mixed, it hardens in about an hour. We're waiting over night to make sure it's dried before we spray more water in the hole. All the while we are doing this, Jason if working on the ceiling panel.
Once Jason was just about done with the preliminaries--dry fitting and extra cutting, he had me drill a hole down through the bolt hole that no longer had the nut on the starboard granny bar. He then took our Fein Multimaster tool and cut away the ceiling--about a 5 inch square hole right were the brackets for the granny bar is located. Once we got the chunk of ceiling wood off, we couldn't find the nut. It's was gone. The plate for the nut was there but no nut. No big deal as I'm sure we have more of them on board. We think we have figured out how to get the hole fixed and I'll let you know next week how that goes.
After Jason was gone, we started cleaning up the boat. It's gotten out of hand with everything we have to store inside while the workmen trash the outside. Add in all the sawdust from Jasons project and it was a mess. We used the portable vac till it's battery died and then move onto a second portable vac we have and then onto our big vac and it did what the others couldn't. It sucked up every thing. We took the life raft back out side, put away tools. Threw away tons of trash and got the place presentable again. Now we still aren't good but but are a lot better.
Tracy spent some early morning time taking off more of the blue tape from last Fridays paintathon finding more mistakes--blotches, runs and drips of paint. Some areas that got missed. It got to me after a while that no matter what these guys do(Sneezy and Sleepy) it gets screwed up. They painted hardware that they were supposed to cover with tape. One guy sat on the edge of the cockpit, leaving a nice print of his ass in the new paint and we won't even talk about the times they have sprayed water all over the deck getting it into the holes left from the hardware we had to remove. I'm just so tired of finding their screw ups and hoping they will fix them. So far they have but it just delays us farther an farther into the month and at over $22US per day to stay here, it adds up quickly.
Tomorrow, if the putty I put in the hole stops the leak, we will be putting the ceiling back up in the stern head and rehooking up the wires I had to cut to get the ceiling down. If there is time, we need to empty the anchor locker so I can get to the underside of the forward deck and redrill four more holes they filled over. These are for the forestaysail stay bracket. We also have to caulk under each of the deck fills--2 water, 2 diesel, and a black water pump out through deck fitting. We can't do the deck prisms as they still need to paint around them. Maybe next week. Plus, we have Mexican Train dominoes at Crews Inn in the after noon so we've got a busy morning ahead of us.