Kaimusailing

s/v Kaimu Wharram Catamaran

Vessel Name: Kaimu
Vessel Make/Model: Wharram Custom
Hailing Port: Norwalk, CT
Crew: Andy and the Kaimu Crew
About: Sailors in the Baltimore, Annapolis, DC area.
04 February 2025 | St. Marys, GA
22 January 2025 | St. Marys, GA
15 January 2025 | St. Marys, GA
06 January 2025 | St. Marys, GA
24 December 2024 | St. Marys, GA
16 December 2024 | St. Marys, GA
02 December 2024 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2024 | St. Marys, GA
31 October 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
10 October 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
03 October 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
24 September 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
13 September 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
09 September 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
04 September 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
28 August 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
21 August 2024 | Belmar Beach, NJ
11 August 2024 | Somers Cove, Crisfield, MD
24 July 2024 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
08 July 2024 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
Recent Blog Posts
04 February 2025 | St. Marys, GA

Bisque with a Twist

The cold spell, arctic outburst, polar vortex, whatever, left me with pork chops and other ingredients for another batch of bean soup. After surviving potential ice skating on the swimming ladder and interminable snow melt dripping on me in my moldy freezing bunk, it was time to cautiously figure out [...]

22 January 2025 | St. Marys, GA

Snow Daze

I picked up a couple closet poles at Loews. These are the mast and sprit for the dinghy sail rig. Hardwood, probably oak. 1 3/8” diameter, 8 feet long. The plan from Maartens calls for 2” diameter spruce, but that is for an unstayed mast. I will be staying the mast on both the D4 dinghy here [...]

15 January 2025 | St. Marys, GA

Bean Soup I

If I am not taking pictures or writing it could be that I am depressed, but also there is a cycle in creativity, unless you are a manic artist. It seems sometimes that the extremists are the ones who get anything done. You have to play life like a hockey game, give it your all, then take a restful [...]

06 January 2025 | St. Marys, GA

Wishing for Sumner

The trouble with the pork chops is that they constituted a new form of substance, very good if you want to go on a diet without pork chops. Not so good for me. I don’t know how these things became tempered like steel, the spanish rice with them should have dissolved some of that iron.

24 December 2024 | St. Marys, GA

Shrimp Poke Bowl

I enjoyed the last of the stuffed cabbage. The fridge was now bare of leftovers except for bean soup which was in the little freezer. I decided to make a clam florentine soup derived from a shrimp recipe.

16 December 2024 | St. Marys, GA

Storm and Stuffed Cabbage

Not my clowns, not my circus. That is an amusing phrase, especially now. RFK jr in charge of health. The clowns come in, send in the clowns. It seems to be a recurring theme. If you put clowns in charge of government agencies, then you can take them down. I rant, but government is not a single [...]

The Bunk Spaces

18 May 2011 | at the dock
Captn Andy/ rainy day
I began removing all the stuff that had accumulated in the forward bunk. Some of it was restowed and some of it was gathered on the dock to take to recycling. There were two big boxes, one of plumbing parts, the other of windsurfing and sailing hardware. I expected to find the flexible water tank under the bunk boards, but instead there were a bunch of plumbing fittings. The whole area was dusty so I vacuumed, then scrubbed the whole space. Then it was spray painted with clearcoat over any bare spots or stains, and then with arctic white.
I had been having problems with the HVLP spray gun (high volume low pressure) because the compressor pressure regulator wouldn't maintain a lower pressure than the 120 psi or so that the compressor reached at maximum. When I tried to adjust the regulator to a lower pressure, the regulated pressure would drop to zero when I used the spray gun. The result of running the spray gun at the highest pressure was too much overspray and very little paint coming through. I had a separate regulator that had an air filter and oiler, and a short coil hose to connect to the spray gun. When it was pressurized, the coil hose had leaks, so I bandaged them with cold shrink tape. I tested the new set up and found it to work much better. More paint was flowing and at the lower pressure it wasn't fogging the air with paint.
When I actually started painting, the coil hose repair started to fail. I had to use the paint up, so I attached the regulator directly to the spray gun. It was very odd looking, but it worked.
I found the water tank and the fittings. The inlet elbow was the same size as the deck fill fitting. All I needed was a hose from the deck to the top of the tank, about 5 or 6 feet. The outlet elbow was too large, it was the same 1 1/4" tapered fitting as the inlet elbow, but the outlet would feed a pump that had ordinary garden hose thread fittings. A hose of 1/2" to 3/4" would work for the feed to the pump, but no one had a fitting that would reduce from 1 1/4 to the smaller sizes. The tank would be located under the bunk. There was an additional lower level below the water tank and it would become inaccessible after the tank was installed, so I used that space to add flotation. I put empty half liter water bottles into the lowest space and then nailed the access panels over them.
I read some boat plumbing information and it said if you can't fit a hose onto a fitting, boil the hose in water, then it will get soft and fit over the fitting. I got some 1 1/4" vinyl hose and boiled it. It fit over the 1 1/2" deck fitting and the inlet to the water tank. On the outlet I used a piece of the same hose and mated it to a plumbing fitting that was 1 1/4", so it was the only fitting that matched the hose. The deck fill was bedded into the deck and the inlet was attached to the tank. The outlet was attached and next would be connecting it to the water pump, but that would be done in the future. I next went to the main bunk, above the crawl space and at the middle of the port hull.
All the stuff in the main bunk had to be stowed elsewhere. There were windsurfing sails, a roll of sunbrella fabric, a roll of clear shrink wrap winter covering, plus a lot of other stuff in bins stacked up. After laboriously moving the moutain of stuff, the small debris left over had to be swept up, vacuumed up, and then sponged up, till the bunk was clean. But it was not clean. Over time all kinds of resin, paint, fabric, paper, and small items had become stuck to the bunk. An old kitchen knife, like a vegetable knife, helped scrape most of the big things off the bunk. Then a quick run of the pad sander with wet/dry paper of 120 grit and water sponged onto the surface brought it down smooth and ready for paint. There was a small bookshelf with a rusty quart can of fiberglass resin lying on its side. The shelf was a sea of goo. It was like taffy and was very hard to pry up off the surface. When I scraped up a bit, there was a trail of goo to the wastebucket. I used a half roll of paper towels to try to control the mess. Some acetone and an old paint brush loosened up the remainder and more paper towels soaked that up and it was all thrown away. I was somewhat dizzy from the acetone fumes, but happy that the bunk had been reclaimed.
One of the storage items was an old Serotta bicycle, the one I had used in Annapolis to get from the harbormaster to Eastport where I could park on weekends. I did a lot of riding around Eastport and Annapolis, but one day the bike seized up. There was salt in the bearings and I never used it again. Once I was up on Bodkin Creek, a trip to the local flea market got me a working bicycle for 28 bucks. That was at least 5 years ago and that poor cycle was left out in the winter and rain and kept working all this time. I had to replace a cable or two and brake pads. Because it kept working, I left the Serotta bicycle where it was and didn't bother to restore it. Now it was out of the main bunk, so I took a look at it and looked online for some advice on how to proceed. It had Shimano Ultegra components. Serotta has a MSRP of $4400 for the current model. I'd better get after it and see what I could do. I disassembled the front and rear bearings, cleaned up the parts, and reassembled it. The chain was stiff and rusty. Salt just does havoc on bicycles. I soaked the chain in WD-40. It took a while to clean things up, including cleaning up the area where I cleaned things up. I found the old Italian air pump with its Presta valve fittings and pressure gauge. It needed some help with cleaning and grease. When I tried pumping up the tires, which were looking very oxidized and cracked, they pumped up just fine, over 100 psi. After some adjustments, I rode the bike back to the cottage and had lunch. Then I rode around on it. It was just like the first time I rode it years ago, the only limitation to that high speed rush of wind in the face is the rider's cardiovascular capacity. Too soon, I had to take a break. The other bike, the 28 dollar bike, was like a horse cart, plodding along with no indication that it would be possible or beneficial to ride any faster. But the Serotta was a thoroughbred, its gearing was higher and it ran up to a much higher speed. Then the lungs complained and it was me who was the limiting factor. I wanted to ride it more and build up my endurance. I was happy that the bike was in working condition in just a couple hours of attention.
The main bunk was ready to be masked off for painting. There was just an area of bubbly finish that needed scraping overhead. It turned out to be more like an area of rot. The cabin roof was similar composite construction to the deck. There was an outer surface of 3/8 ply with epoxy glass over that and the inner core was high density foam. The inside surface that I was now scraping was 1/4 ply that was painted with epoxy. A common problem area in Wharram catamarans is the underside of the deck and underside of the cabin top. Warm air rises and when it hits these surfaces, if they are cool, moisture condenses and eventually that moisture migrates into the wood. Then it is trapped there by the same epoxy surface that is supposed to keep the moisture out. As I scraped debris kept falling down on me and I had to get eye protection. The area that needed attention was about 3 feet wide and 4 feet long, with a couple of extra little spots. I was trying to scrape things down to a smooth consistant surface so that the repair panel mate perfectly with the exposed surface. It wasn't at all smooth and consistant. One tool that I hadn't used before is the scraper attachment for the Harbor Freight multitool. I was surprised how effective the multitool proved to be when I used its saw blade attachments to cut out electrical outlet holes. I also used it on this scraping job to trim the edges of the area straight. When I put on the scraper attachment and started scraping, it was effortless and took off perfect layers creating the surface I needed. When I was done scraping, I ran the pad sander with 120 grit paper over the area and it was smooth as a baby's bottom. Next I brought some 24 X 48 inch panels of 1/4 hardwood ply from Home Depot. The next day was a rain day, but I was able to put a coat of epoxy on the panel and on the overhead, then put the panel in position and forced it into the curved shape of the overhead with hydraulic porta-power and a convenient beam-like piece of wood. The attached picture shows the panel jammed into place. There is additional area of about 12"X48" which needs scraping and trimming to rectangular shape and it will get its own panel, about half the size of the one just installed. I spent the rest of the rain day shopping for hydraulic oil for the portapower and more nitrile gloves for painting and gluing.
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