Kaimusailing

We hauled Kaimu out, finally, she had been tied up at the boatyard's floating dock. The tide was flooding and near high tide. I started the engine and sidled away from the dock into the current. I was 15 minutes early but creeping so slowly into the current Kaimu was almost perfectly still. The LCM "Mike" boat that blocked the staging area fired up and backed out into the North River Marsh. The crane was running and the haulout crew were standing by. I turned Kiamu to port and let the current, which was now nearly slack, nudge us up against the dock. The crane lowered the lifting slings while the crew wrestled with the huge straps that ran under the hulls, aligned with crossbeams #2 and #4. The straps were shackled to the slings with huge galvanized shackles. The crane took the slack out of the slings and tested the balance of the rig, then lifted Kaimu up and swung her around, now over the hard of the boatyard. Suspended in midair about 4 feet up, Kaimu was twisting in the slings while the crew brought large styrofoam blocks under her keels, positioning them at crossbeams #1 and #3, then she was lowered onto the blocks.
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After lunch the crew brought over a couple of scrapers on long handles as well as a portable gas powered pressure washer. Rocky, boatyard owner, manager, and chief crane operator began blasting the marine growth off the hulls and his son Rocky Jr. began scraping barnacles, etc. off the hulls. I felt compelled to assist them and grabbed the second scraper and began scraping. I noticed I was keeping up with Rocky Jr. and began to go a little faster, got into a rhythm and soon was outpacing the younger man. Then the hulls were scraped and clean.
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We sat on the styrofoam for a couple of days. The yard foreman was in hospital with heart problems. Then I heard the boatyard's cradle mover, that I called "Tri-Cera-Lift", was started while I was munching breakfast. I knew they were getting ready to move us to a more permanent spot. I gulped down breakfast and coffee and climbed down the swimming ladder onto land, triced up the ladder and went looking for the boatyard crew. Rocky was there with his sister as a helper. They lifted Kaimu up and drove her to the spot vacated by the big catamaran, "Tool Box". Then Rocky's sister began lugging large balks of lumber, 8X8's, to build blocking under Kaimu's keels. I couldn't stand by idle while a diminutive lady was working so hard, so I began moving balks too. Soon Kaimu was ready to be lowered onto the blocks.
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The next day I was sore, I had overdone it. I began offloading unnecessary stuff, like the sewing machine that had packed up solid due to the salt environment and the temporary wood beam that I used when replacing crossbeam #4. Work was interrupted by the weather going cold again, along with high winds. This was a recurring theme, a few mild days, then a cold front with gale or tornado warnings, and rain.
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I was ordering supplies for Kaimu such as bottom paint and winch handles. The boatyard advised me that Sea Guard was the bottom paint that seemed to work best in the North River and was the paint that the Navy was using on their tugs. For some reason I thought it was Sea Hawk, a totally different brand, more expensive, and maybe even more effective. While at Defender Industries website looking at the Sea Hawk bottom paint, I saw that Pettit SR-40 was on clearance at only $99/gal. so I ordered 2 gallons.
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It seems that SR-40 was originally formulated with Irgarol, a biocide, but the supplier quit making it, so the paint was reformulated without it and now had PTFE. Then the supplies of Irgarol became available again, so the paint was back to its original formulation. This made the non-Irgarol paint kind of obsolete, so it was on sale at a huge discount. It has 47% copper, similar to Sea Gard. It's original list price was $270/gal. I also ordered a couple pints of biocide to make up for the missing Irgarol, it was about 80 or 90 bucks for the biocide.
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The paint was due to be delivered but something happened and the UPS tracking information said the delivery was halted and the package returned to their distribution center. No further information except that the sender would be contacted. I called Defender, anxious to find out what happened to my paint, imagining a UPS truck with a sea of green bottom paint swirling around on everyone's packages. Defender said they hadn't been contacted. I called UPS and after considerable hemming and hawing the customer service rep assured me the paint cans in the package were not damaged, but the package itself was damaged in some way. The paint should arrive in a couple days.
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The photo is of happy satisfied pizza patrons at the last pizza night.