If cruising is doing maintenance in beautiful places, then we are cruising. The estuary here in San Blas is surge free and reasonably quiet, albeit a bit of a panga highway, and as such it seemed a good place to hang for a while and catch up on some boat keeping.
Our Douglas Fir bulwarks, channels, and whalestrake are varnish over Cetol and will usually last six months between re-coats. The starboard side was last done in April 08, so the salt and sun coming down here blasted the last respectable vestige of varnish off most of the horizontal surfaces.
So we have spent the last week or so sanding, and re-coating with 3 to 5 coats of Captains varnish. We have an issue with the Cetol bubbling off the wood in areas ranging in size from a dime to a tennis ball. Mandy's wood was steeped in Dolphinite when she was constructed and although good for rot resistance, I have a feeling it makes for difficulties with adhesion fro the Cetol. Any suggestions?
While Virginia has been varnishing away I have glued, trimmed and sanded about 50 wood bungs down below. Over the last two years whilst building the refrigerator and changing other cabinetry I have put off covering the screw heads, but it is good to now have Mandy cured of the pox.
Also we have now got our Mac Mini and Sony monitor running directly from the house 12v batteries through a Carnetix P1900 DC/DC regulator. This seems like a good bit of gear, only a little blue smoke was evident during installation, and it is more efficient than running either the Mac or the PC lap top through the inverter.
I have found a couple of stays (one whisker, one boomkin) with some bleeding rust showing through the serving. We had this on the opposite whisker stay before and, with Brian Toss's "The Rigger's Apprentice" in hand, it was not too difficult to unwind the serving and parceling, wire brush and reslush the stay with Lanacote, and then re-serve. Trying our best to follow Evans Starzinger and Beth Leonard's mantra of " Find it. Fix it" this will be the next job.
The rest of our down time here has been spent re-stowing. It is staggering how much time on a small boat is spent finding things and then covering them up again. We have everything on the boat inventoried in a spreadsheet, which is anal but nevertheless vital. As we proceed we are trying to order the storage so that the least amount of over storage (moving one thing to get another) occurs. It's not a battle to be won but a war to be waged.
Now we have used all the varnish we have and want to sail again, so tomorrow we will leave the estuary and head south again to look for another beautiful place to do more maintenance.