Kaimusailing

I said I would look for Mel’s hole and it’s on wikipedia at:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel%27s_Hole
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Also there are other links.
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I kind of knew I was overdue for a blog post last time, but so much was going on that there was no continuity, nothing to report that made sense. I started on this and that and jumped around on projects. I am still in the middle of that jumping around. It might be a thing that goes on now for a month or so. The fairing of the bottom of Kaimu will take a couple of weeks at least. Then there is bottom paint. Trillium has been purchased by “Doc”, the local medical examiner turned boat-disassembly-guy, but hasn’t been finalized yet. I’m going out into the river and ferrying back some of the gear that is stowed on board Trillium, and that is mostly done. I really like that boat, but I can’t sail two boats, so it is bon voyage.
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I meant to take a break from working with epoxy due to my allergy to it, but it seems I must keep on, it seems that every task involves epoxy, fairing the hull bottoms, glassing the gas tank together. I am monitoring my rash and any other allergic responses to epoxy.
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I meant to post about something called hypercollage photography. It is a digital photography technique that layers multiple images and then makes a high definition image that can be very incongruous. For example:
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https://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/19/photography-by-jim-kazanjian/
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I first ran across this technique on saatchiart.com with works by Ysabel LeMay of the US. If you remember from art class, the background is painted first, then the midground, then the foreground, and things can get more complicated as we add more things inter woven with other things. Putting things in their place can be tedious and time consuming, so her works have a high price, but she limits the number of pieces in a series, so that also ups the price. In the old days of film photography, this sort of thing would be almost impossible, but with CGI, digital photo manipulation, it can be done. Do you like it? It doesn’t matter. The artist likes it.
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Normally when I don’t take a photograph for a while I wonder what is up. Am I depressed, where is my creative vision. Maybe it’s the place I’m in, reading a lot of Stephen Ambrose’s military books, filled with desperate struggles in awful circumstances, all of it expressed in personal accounts by those who somehow survived, but also some who wrote something before they were cut down in battle. He has a few books out there, Band of Brothers is one that most people have heard of, Pegasus Bridge, and the one I’ve just finished, Citizen Army.
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I read a book that has Eisenhower at the forefront near the end of the war, then I start Bill Clinton’s “My Life”, and Eisenhower is a political figure right in the beginning. I get a taste of the time when I was just a toddler and the nation was recovering from the wartime effort. We kids thought of the war as long ago, but it was not long ago, the effects on the nation were still evident. Now we have had a bunch of little wars and whatever anybody thought that the war to end all wars had happened, did not happen. The war to end all wars will be the war that wipes out humanity, but that might not end all wars. It seems that struggle is always a factor in surviving to pass on the DNA, but if you don’t make it, some other life form will.
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I am very proud of one of my nieces who is involved with oceanography, but more marine biology. She has compassion for the marine animals that have to endure chemicals, audio intrusion, and the effects of global warming. The biology is so complex and there is a debate about whether man is a big factor in the global warming cycle. I don’t care about that debate. There is a part of me that aligns with the sense that we are custodians of the environment and we should try to preserve it and pass it on to the next generations. The taildraggers want to make money, want no government regulation, but there are others who are trying to be good citizens of planet earth and work a little bit harder to integrate with nature’s systems.
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I had a thought that if a single boat like Kaimu was concerned about polluting, what about massive cruise ships.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_ship_pollution_in_the_United_States
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It’s very difficult to look at a part of the picture, then look at the whole picture, a person using a latrine in a remote region might not have any clue about what this means when it is projected on a few more billion of humanity. This is kind of like where I can find the dividing line between environmental criminals and those who are innocent. Think about this debate and your own practices, do you pee overboard, what about bucket and chuck it? What if everybody lived on a boat and bucket/chucked it?
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OK, I was just joking, think about what whales get rid of in our pristine waters. But they have to at least have some biological sense that they are polluting their own waters. And the fish and all the other digestive beings that populate the ocean. There is a balance.
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So, I want to put a mechanical head that discharges overboard in the aft storage space in the starboard hull. It will have to have a lock on it so that no one uses it outside the USA mandates, that is, offshore. I will probably only install the through hull fittings and seacocks, then install the plumbing and head later.
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My plan was to work on the gas tank when we got hit with rainy weather, work in the woodshop inside where it is dry. The rain came through in a strong cold front that hit Sunday afternoon.
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The old gas tank was made out of wood and epoxy and maybe it could be tossed out, but it also provided a way to mount the new tank and also retain the old tank’s above deck features, two long storage bins with tops that were in good shape. The gas tank and the anchor rode locker were very similar, one before the mast and the other after. Both had long covers that covered storage bins, in the anchor rode locker one side held the anchor rode and the other side was a rope locker, in the gas tank the bins were shallow and could take winch handles or other commonly used deck tools.
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When I cut the tank part off of the old gas tank, the upper portion kind of fell apart. It was worth resurrecting because it was already sized to fit the space it was removed from, complete with mounting bolt holes (14 of them), so it was easier to repair it than build a new one. In the woodshop I carefully reconstructed it and screwed and glued it back together. Then I turned my attention to the replacement gas tank, an aluminum 22 gallon tank that needed protection from exposure to salt water.
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I had read Russ Brown’s online postings about working with aluminum and to get adhesion to aluminum he wet sanded epoxy to the aluminum’s skin. This prevented oxygen from oxidating the fresh aluminum surface. Normally when you sand aluminum the oxidized surface has no strength, if you glue to it the glue line will separate and all you will have is a coating of aluminum oxide on the glue. I needed to stick paint to aluminum and also have a barrier coat to keep salt water from it. It looked like the Russ Brown method of treating the aluminum with epoxy would enable both issues, so I cleaned the tank with detergent solution and a scotch brite pad, then dried the tank and sanded epoxy into the surface. I used the little harbor freight pad sander with 3M stick on 150 grit paper. I painted the paper with epoxy after I painted the tank. This was to prevent sucking up epoxy from the tank and exposing it to air. Afterwards I threw away the sanding pads that were soaked with epoxy and added a freshener coat of epoxy to the tank.
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I only painted the top of the tank and the ends, later the sides and bottom will be coated with epoxy and fiberglass which will wrap around the old upper fuel tank, new lower aluminum tank, and back up the other side of the old tank. In effect the fiberglass will be like a stork’s cradle and will support the new tank. When full it might weigh 200 lbs. so it needs support.
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The image is from German collagist Sabine Remy who has a website at  http://miriskum.de
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She is very prolific and not a hypercollagist.