Sovereign Nations

So, just like that, the galley is done!

Ok, that’s a lie…

After months of working on this project one and two days at a time we did more work in the last two weeks than was possible in the five months prior.

…But first, we took her out for a spin!

We were pretty good about running the engine periodically throughout the winter and the last time we filled the tank with fuel was in Provincetown, Mass, on the trip down to Connecticut this past fall. So it was time to fuel her up, shake off the bottom and get out of the dock for a little reminder of why we do this shit.

It had snowed the night before and it was brutally cold but that never stopped us before.

The trip started out calm, crisp, and beautiful but as we rounded up to head into the Mystic River a big squall bore down on us.  By the time we made it to the Brewers Marina fuel dock, yep, it was snowing again.

After joking with the staff about loving the weather around here and this being the perfect day for a sail, we headed back to Noank and tore into the job once again.

By the end of that day we had the new green trim installed around the new cabinetry and the balustrade painted.

Then we rented a car and ran off to New Haven, Conn, to celebrate my 49th circumnavigation around the sun. It was awesome, we went to the Yale campus to get a look at the Natural History Museum and did a bunch of shopping for the new galley. We tried to get a sneak-peak at Shakespeare’s Hamlet staring Paul Giamatti but of course it had been sold out for months so we headed back to the boat and resumed our labors the next day.

One of the really cool things we picked up the day before was a bunch of new LED lights for the new galley so the first thing we did after making coffee was install our new lights. I can honestly tell you that it has never been that bright in our galley and the best part about it, they only draw .03 amps!

Next, WE MOVED ALL OUR SHIT!!!

To install the balustrade we had to (got to) pull the sink, the stove and remove everything from the shelving, but hey, we love to move our shit so what the heck!

The balustrade install went well once we found the magic cuss words so we moved on to the new cutting board that fits on top of the stove.

While we had everything pulled apart, we (ahem) replaced the bungs we’d removed last summer and did a fresh coat of varnish on the bulkhead.  Requiring a full sanding…

Before the Epifane could be applied.

We went to Ikea in New Haven to get the plastic see-through food containers that we built the new galley around and while we were there we found a cutting board that would go on the stove top pretty well. It was always part of the plan to build a cutting board to fit on top of the stove and stow it behind the stove on its own little rack while we were cooking. It was the way we had it set up on our last boat, S/V Sapien, and it was one of those very smart things about the design of that boat that we wanted to emulate on S/V Itinerant. So we did.

Dena cut and routed the pieces, then I sanded them, then she epoxied them in place and this is what it looked like.

Please don’t get me wrong, Dena made this beautiful table pretty much all by herself.  The only thing I did was sand the pieces before and after she put them in place… Isn’t it incredible?  (Dena’s aside: Except that it was also his idea to do the mahogany pieces around the perimeter and that’s what really makes the whole thing pop like crazy.)

The last piece of this cabinet was the shelving for canned goods.  Eventually there will be cushions so that there’s a seat in front of it, but in the meantime…

And this is how it all came together.

They invented the way we Americans perceive our seasons here in the Atlantic North East. By they I mean, most likely, Ben Franklin, didn’t he invent “all things American”?

…Anyway when it went from February 27th to March 1st it was like flipping a switch from winter to spring and as we all know, springtime, especially March, means wind and rain. The weather reports were telling us that there would be an intense bout with wind and rain this week but only for Tuesday with the rest of the week shaping up to be perfect for our working projects.

So on Monday we loaded up the bikes with everything we’d need for a good long ride and took off early.  We knew that it was going to be a big day, so we planned to eat breakfast along the way.

Ahem.

This story really starts on Friday.  In the rental car, we did as much running around as we could in our efforts to get the doomed refrigerator and the propane stove working.  Our last jaunt of the day was to Airgas in Waterford.  I had called them and the person on the phone said that, yes, they stocked all kinds of hoses already made up and, yes, 25 foot lengths were standard.

When we got there (meaning when a mall sprung up in the middle of nowhere), we discovered that the person on the phone was a bad listener.  Though I had said I needed a 25 foot low pressure propane hose with female 3/8 inch flare fittings on each end, she must have heard 25 foot blah blah hose blah blah blah.  Cause all their hoses were for welding and air tools, not for propane.

At the counter, the guy told us that they might be able to make up the hose we need, but that Ranzie was the guy for that stuff and he was gone.  Wouldn’t be back until Monday.  That being, of course, not a day we planned to have a rental car.

When Monday rolled around and the weather was bearing down on us and we were still eating nothing but PBnJ, we did the only thing we could do to make life easier.  I (Dena) called Airgas – Ranzie’s direct line, no less – and left a message.  Right before we left, I tried again.  And then we rode to the community.  That was our first 5 miles.

Once there, I called again.  This time, I called the main number and was handed to Ranzie.  He was evasive about giving exact answers, but said he had the hose and could figure something out for fittings.  As much as I would have preferred a strong, definitive, and excited yes, that would have to do.

This was the point where we started really counting.  The trip to Airgas was going to be 10 miles, each way, from the community.  There’s a place called DJ’s Campus Kitchen, just on the other side of the Gold Star Bridge.  This is the same bridge we walked across this summer when we went to the Nautilus museum and we ate at DJ’s that morning and just loved the giant, plate-sized pancakes.  So 5 more miles and we’d get some breakfast.  Can do.

No go.  DJ’s is open 6 days a week, Monday not being one of them.  So we decided to hold out in hopes that there would be a decent breakfast place somewhere along the remaining 5 mile route (10 miles having already been covered).

Though we rode through a dizzying array of varied neighborhoods, not a one of them had a breakfast place on the main drag.  This is definitely not Maine.

So we made it to Airgas, feeling good and strong, but hungry.  The conversation with Ranzie was short and effective.  We’d come back in about an hour.

The hunger, though, that got us all tied up.  The only food within a mile was a piece of shit McDonalds in a Wal-Mart.  What could be worse than that?  But with 15 miles of bike riding under our belts with nothing to eat and another 15 to come, we were strongly motivated.  The idea of riding a couple miles to the Ruby Tuesdays brought a fleeting grimace to my face and we rolled on down to Mickey’s.  I’ve never like their fish sandwich.  If in a bind, I choose the King any day, but alas – we got two of our least favorite environments at the same time and James got enough onion from the tartar sauce to send him unhappily to the bathroom.

Shaking off the sense that I’d been manipulated and punished for not driving a car, we went to Lowe’s.

This part of the trip was largely exploratory.  We’ve been debating, for quite some time, on how we were going to build an aft rail for our boat without resorting to the expense of 316 stainless steel and the expertise we would have to hire in order to have it made up and installed.  We’d discussed whether or not we could do it ourselves, without welding, but still – the tube alone is extremely expensive.

Then James brought up an idea he’d been thinking about, and we had one of those moments where it felt like – of course!

Galvanized pipe can be primed and painted.  It can be wrapped with line that can be painted.  It can be protected all kinds of ways, basically, and is more resilient – less brittle – than stainless.  It comes with threaded ends and an array of fittings to apply to those ends.  Best of all, a 10′ length of galvanized pipe is 10-15% the cost of stainless.  Basically, we can do the whole thing for what we’d pay for labor on stainless.  Or another way, we can do galvanized now, whereas stainless would be off in the murky, no-sure-income-having future.

At the store, we priced it out.  We can do the whole project, including extra tube in case we mess up a bend, for $200.  That means getting work a little sooner, but it also means that we can do our entire aft deck project in the next couple weeks.  We’re going to clear the aft deck, fill all the holes, grind/fill/sand/prime/paint/etc, and reinstall all the things we really want, without all the random shit we don’t.  If we didn’t do the rail at the same time, we would have several problems.  Where to lead the propane hoses, since we’re relocating the tanks.  Whether or not to keep the stanchions that are already there and fix those holes later.  Etc.

Better.

Then we went and picked up our perfect propane hose.  Even better.

After 10 miles back to the community, we sat with the cats for a while, trying to make up for leaving them so much.  We each took showers and relaxed a bit.  Then we did miles 25-30.

By the way, for those of you who are bicycling badasses, remember that James did all of that hauling a load in the trailer.  He is the true bad ass.

Ah – finally.

We had wonderful coffee today, percolated on our completely functional gimballed stove.  Love it.

Tuesday, it rained.  We knew it was coming and batted around the idea of a day off, reading and such.  I (Dena) was pretty into that idea, but James was gently persistent.  He kept looking at the Blue Sky MPPT Solar Controller that had just arrived in the mail.  I broke our last one getting it into the dumb box they sent.  This one didn’t come with a box, but we were planning to build our own.

So, why not?  We built it.

First, we drew out the plan.  Second, we cut the holes for the ammeters.

The rest of the cuts went smoothly.

We cut the hole for the controller.

Putting it all together got us:

And then wired it up.

The rest of the box went on the aft bulkhead and this face went on the front.

By which time there was no sunlight left, so we couldn’t even tell if it was working correctly!

And this morning, we discovered that it wasn’t.

The ammeters require shunts.  Which we don’t have.  So James rewired the damn thing to bypass the ammeters, but it definitely works.  It was trickling power into our mostly full battery when we left.

Here at the community, we were meeting a navy wife with two kids who wanted to take our kitty.  We’re looking into finding them new homes because we’re not nearly done with the big projects on the boat.  The noxious chemicals they’ll be exposed to on the boat could be terrible for them, and they can’t leave when it’s bad like we can.  So yeah, the family showed up.

The younger kid jumped right on Tackle, as though he’d misunderstood the name.  He was rough with the cat and we were skeptical enough that we’re waiting to see if there’s another home for him.  Really, he’s just too good a cat.  He didn’t get up and run away when the kid roughed him up.  Weird, right?

Well, there’s no denying he’s a good cat.

We got back to the community- shit, a million years ago- to discover that we were going to have a big (all) managers pow-wow in one of the unfinished 2nd floor apartments. We went up to the apartment, made ourselves comfortable and moments later were joined by the other two sets of managers. The lead managers showed up first, then the shit-heads and we got right down to it. The two leads told us when their last day of work would be and started talking about how there have been tensions and how “we” would “all” have to work together and respect each other and…

I (James) jumped right in and asked the only question that I thought really mattered.

“When are you two leaving?” I was speaking to the two shit-heads that have been lying about us and trying to make our lives miserable over the last five months.  They were supposed to go to their new community at the end of February or beginning of March.

The response was a simple, “At least two more months.”

The math made it’s way through my head… They weren’t leaving and our regional manager had already made them an offer to be the lead managers of the community and there was no fucking way I was going to work for those lying, cheating do-nothings so my response was simple.

“There is no way I’m going to work with these two fucking clowns for even one more second.”

Dena said, “Yeah, this won’t work.  We quit.  This is our last day.  Our last hour.  Our last 15 minutes.”

Okay.  That’s done.

Back to the boat.  Literally.  We jumped on our bikes and rode to the boat to finish the last day-off project – inserts to make the sinks usable as countertop space.

Then we rode back again.  The focus had shifted.

Now we have to make the boat livable, get all our shit on board (moving all our shit…again!), and create an environment for the cats.  The very next day, we put an ad up on Craigslist for a moving sale.  Two days after quitting, we sold everything we’d purchased in order to make that dumb apartment work for us.  Lighter and a tiny bit richer, we turned all our attention to the boat.

Livable means working stove and plumbing.  It means stowing our clothes and tools again.  It means installing the refrigerator.  It means devising a plan for our two roommates – the cats.

The stove has been a nightmare of parts problems.  We moved the stove farther from the tank, so we got a longer hose.  The fittings are the wrong size, so we hunted in vain for reducers don’t exist.  While we hunted, the weather worsened.  We’re still without a way of heating food, so this is our diet:

This fits not only our cooking options, but also our financial situation.  We’re doing it low-budget from here on, as we didn’t make enough money from the corporate hell in order to fund serious boat work.  We’re talking reusing materials and buying on the cheap at every turn.  And since we like PBnJ well enough and making the boat suffer is not an option…we’ll eat basic.

Installing the sink was another project of major importance.  Again, fittings were lacking.  We have managed to find them at this point, and both the pressure and foot pump are hooked up and working but not without that level of difficulty that you only get on a boat.

Before we could test the water coming in, we had to hook up the drain so it would have some way of getting out.

A process which proceeded with the usual number of skinned knuckles from tightening hose clamps.  We also had to replace our stiff sanitation hose with the flexible bilge hose you see in the next photo – it’s the stuff with the dark coil.

And then we ran some water.

James filled a mug and sipped.  Then spat.

It seems that, when our bilge pump broke earlier this year, salt water sat on top of the water tank access hatches long enough to seep into the main water tanks thus fouling the remainder of the water we had in there.  Bad, bad, bad.  Now we’ll have to empty the tank, refill it, re-empty it, and probably shock it with vodka or bleach.  We’d more or less expected to have to clean the tank, but we didn’t foresee the salt.

Last on the list of things that did not go well – and this is a big one – is the refrigerator.  First, building it into the old hanging locker was a string-of-curses kind of experience.  It’s so strong and firm now, that it’s hard to remember what was difficult about it.  Building the compartment is overshadowed by our next discovery.

The fucking refrigerator doesn’t work.

It comes on and runs for a while, but then it starts to short-cycle.  On for about 3 seconds, off for about 5 seconds.  Also, it’s not cooling.

So we rented a car.

By the way, there was this storm.  Gale force winds blowing snow around.

But we kept working inside the boat – luckily we didn’t have to ride to it!

Living aboard is better.

Anyway, a stormy day seemed like a good time for the car rental.  We took the refrigerator to the nearest authorized service center just to discover they don’t even make the parts for it anymore.  I’m (Dena is) grateful to the service person who suggested we check with the parts department before giving them $75 to diagnose the problem.  If we’d paid $75 to find out that problem couldn’t be fixed, I would have been infuriated.  As it is, we donated $230 to a local marine chandlery (the same one we patronized for the hinges we didn’t use) and drove all the way to Rhode Island for no real reason.

Except – we hit a Lowe’s while we were there and got the trim we needed in order to move forward in the galley.

We cut the trim to the right length, putting 45 degree angles on the places where two pieces met.

Yay miter box!

Put some primer on them…

James put the first coat of paint on today.

Meanwhile, we also finished the drawer by cutting and routing out the handle.

We also cut and routed the finger holes, then repainted the hatch covers.

Finally, today, they were ready to install.

The galley cabinet is well on its way toward done.

Hey – what’s that whiskey doing there?  Gimme that!

And yeah.  We’re getting things done at 10x the rate we were before and spending almost all our time on board.  It’s amazing how fast this stuff goes when we’re working on it every day, even when it feels like one step forward and two steps back.  Remember our favorite saying?

The only work worth doing.

I woke up and Dena was standing above me dressed in her rain-riding gear. “There’s coffee, it’s yummy!”

“Are you out of here?”

“Yep, see you on the boat.”

“Yes.” The kiss, the door, silence.

I (James) drag myself out and pump the first two cups in before the crust of another sleepless night in this fucked up place has left my limited vision.

The last of Cryptonomicon is coveted.

When I’m alone in this place I feel attacked with no armor, so I’m out.

With the bike and trailer packed I step out into the winter streets, into the rain. Before I’m even out of the community property I feel alone, it’s not as much fun. It’s not as much fun because when I’m by myself I tend to immerse myself in my week, in my past and before I know it I’m pushing myself to the limits of my abilities.

In no time flat I’m drenched in my own viscousness, heart pumping, burning.

I opt for the back country trail and almost immediately regret it but push on, I do. The snow is almost gone but what is left is thick and hard on a bed of cold wet earth that sucks my wheels deep in its grasp.   The trail that we have come to know so well is unrecognizable in its present state. The trees have fallen over what was once a manicured urban refuge and the sludge is so thick in places that it can stop a biker cold. When I stop it’s a surgical procedure to remove the bike from the sucking mess.

After a while I regain  the machine of the ride. The legs, the lungs, the heart, the perspiration, the twin jets of steam ejecting from my nostrils, all in sync, all a part of the experience that is my existence. I feel a sudden shudder, look behind me and notice that the wheel to the trailer is about 60 yards behind me and the trailer is buried in the snow all the way up to the fork that attaches it to the bike.

Meanwhile, I (Dena) have been riding to Planned Parenthood for my annual vag exam.  I get a real pleasure out of going there when I have insurance that will pay because I think it very likely that I’ll have to go back someday without insurance or money.  My pleasure aside, it’s in New London, the wrong direction for getting to the boat.

And I did a bad job of keeping that ride short.

First it was a left when I should have gone right.  Next it was straight when I should have gone left, then straight on a shouda-gone-right.  This place is hell for labeling the small road but never the major ones.  Like we’re all just supposed to know the important ones.  It made a 5.5 mile ride into at least 7 and added a handful of killer hills.  At the clinic, I cleaned up in the bathroom as best I could before baring all to the practitioner.

No fuss, no muss, and I’m back out the door.  Next is the bike shop, another killer hill away.  The only late-arriving problem with my bike from its 2-week vacation underwater – the little drop of solder at the shifter end of my front derailleur cable rusted away and I have been riding on the smallest front gear.  Not a problem really, but it gives me a very unsatisfactory top speed.

No fuss, no muss, once again.  The guy there worked on my bike after the dunking and he was amused that this is the only thing that’s cropped up since.  He was fast, too, so I jumped back on the bike.

Food!  I went to Saeed’s International Market and got a falafel sandwich – yum! – and then back on the bike.  Down the hill to our new boat-home come April.  Burr’s Marina.

From Burr’s, it’s 5 minutes to an excellent coffee shop and 40 minutes to the community.  Except that I kept riding and headed to the boat.  On that topic?  Well, what James said.  Except that both my wheels stayed on the bike.

…Oh, my (James’) bike wheels stayed on, it was the trailer wheel that got yanked off while plowing through a web of fallen trees in the middle of nowhere! I trudged back through the muck and got the little 10 inch trailer wheel. It didn’t have any signs of damage but the wheel is attached with a quick-release hub and it must have been yanked open by all the detritus on the “trail”. Back at the bike I clipped the wheel back on, spun it in place,  jumped back on the bike and resumed the labors.

I made to the boat only about 15 minutes later and immediately started MOVING ALL OUR SHIT, Yeah!

After doing that “thing” I decided to do a preliminary mock up to see how the counter-top and the cabinet face would all fit together and discovered a major error in our calculations from last week.

If you remember, we installed the stopper-blocks and the latches on all the cabinet hatches last week, a beautiful, simple and elegant method of stopping the hatches from opening too far into the cabinet. When I went to put it all together the stopper-blocks wouldn’t allow the cabinet to fit together, it didn’t fit! Shit!

You see, we forgot that we had installed an anti-flexing brace at the bottom of the foundation of the new cabinet to strengthen the horizontal lines and that brace is just a little too big for the stopper-blocks to fit under. So I had to (got to) remove all the stopper blocks on all the new hatches essentially undoing all the work we had done last week.

After I removed the blocks and the latches the new cabinet fit together perfectly.

I decided to put-a-pin in that one until Dena got back so we could work out that issue together.

Next I went to work on cutting the third final internal hatch-cover for the inside of the cabinet under the new drawer. That project went really well and I put the mock up together shortly thereafter without even getting a picture of it.

And that’s when I (Dena) arrived.

Freaked out and wrung out from a long, long morning, I had a hard time transitioning to the job at hand.  James suggested a couple of tasks and gave me the space to shift to boat-think.  We marked and cut the hole for the fresh water foot pump.  We removed all the hatch covers.

Once I was there, I was all the way there.

“Okay.  Let’s put it together.”

“You mean…together?”

“Yep.”

“Okay.  Let’s do this thing!”

And we did.

After all these months of toting this shit back and forth, we were finally going to put the work together.  We sanded the mating surfaces, coated them with West System G-Flex epoxy, and screwed.

The shelf we added in order to best use the inside space was a little wide and flexed the forward side out.  A block and a clamp fixed that little problem, and a whole lot of screws and some epoxy will keep it fixed.

And there it was.  The new galley was essentially together.

So of course, we broke out the whiskey, filled the Noanker cups, and freaked the fuck out.

There was nothing else to do at that moment.  We couldn’t paint because the epoxy had to cure.  The marine consignment shop wasn’t open, so we couldn’t shop for new hatch latches (doggonit).  We were pretty happy with this option.

Let the freaking out begin!

This week, we made it to the boat.

The streets were clear, but the paved trail was still raw snow.  Turning back, we made stab at the back country trail.  We could only ride across small patches, which left us with about 3 miles worth of pushing the bikes and slogging through snow that was up to 2 feet deep.

Sweaty work.  Very hard to do.

When we got off the trail in Mumford Cove, we cheered each other and relished the smooth roll over pavement.  And then it was straight to work.

The project for the day – priming everything.

From:

To:

The smell was so foul that we couldn’t stay in the boat.  Cold air doesn’t move very fast and fumes don’t dissipate.  In summertime, we can do a project like this and go for food (exactly what we did).  When we come back, we can do another project or just relax aboard.  Not in the winter.

So we went to a movie.  Quartet.  Good movie, enjoyable.  I don’t think the big screen was a critical component of our enjoyment, but the big sound system rocked the Bach and Verdi.  But you have to know – we didn’t have to go to this movie.  We live this life.  The only element that was missing from what we live on a daily basis – ours isn’t a home for retired artists, and their estate was definitely not a dump like the place we live.

By the way, going to a movie means another 6 mile bike ride each way.  This time, in the dark and freezing cold.  We moaned and groaned a bit, but the light exercise (we took it easy) felt good after the morning’s labor.

Next day, we turned our attention to installing the hatches in the cabinetry.

An impulse buy put our plans awry.  We had combed carefully through the Mystic Marine Consignment shop’s bins of hinges to find some that would work for us.  We wanted strong, low profile, and easy to install.  We found two of the three.

The easy-to-install element was missing.  These hinges attach outside the cabinet and then inside the hatch cover.  This means that they’re made for a specific thickness of material and they weren’t made for ours.

The options: carefully route the backs of each hatch cover exactly to the depth of the hinge or spend another $80 on hinges.

At the Spicer’s chandlery, James spotted heavy-duty stainless hinges – the kind we had intended to buy in the very beginning.

…we’re hoping they’ll take a return at the consignment store.

You can see how buff these hinges are.  We’re through-bolting them for the last word in strength.  Turns out, it’s hard to find a #10, 1/2 inch tapping screw with more than a couple threads – not the best situation for a hatch cover that could be stepped on due to a lurch in the boat’s motion at sea.

Second part of the hatch cover install is the combination latch and stopper block.

We’re not going to put the nuts on the bolts until we’ve painted the whole thing.  Lots easier to do without the hardware installed than by taping everything.

One last piece was installed – a brace for the big shelf that will also keep loose items from shifting behind the drawer when it’s pulled out.

Last but not least, we followed up the previous day’s priming with some painting.

And then, (fumes) we beat feet out of there.  Or to be more precise, burned rubber.

On the way back, James thought we should try the high road – the paved trail.  After a shaky start, we rode about half the distance on clearish tarmac.  My least favorite moment was when the cart slewed sideways just as James rode onto an icy bridge.  Jackknife!  But no – he saved himself from the ignominious fall ass over pedals into the frozen trickle of a stream.

The last mile and half was riding on top of a 2 foot snow bank.  The sun had worked on the former powder to create a glistening crust that was several inches thick.  Where we dropped into other people’s foot prints, we cracked through and had to plow through the crust until surface tension brought us back on top.  Slowing down was tragic.  Stopping was sunk.

The ice built up on our brakes and the feeling was as though riding with the brakes on the whole time.

Breathless laughter and mock racing kept us moving until we couldn’t.  Then a little slogging to another firm patch and back on the bikes.

This was, by far, the most bad-ass thing we’ve ever done. (Says James.  Dena adds, “that couldn’t really kills us.”)  Note: there are no photos of this bad-assery.  We were busy.

We did burn an entire pizza worth of calories, so we put that back immediately.

Next week, we’ll be dealing with another fresh snowfall.  We’re itching to get the top and front installed, the plumbing in, and the stove suspended on its gimbals.  This is all possible, but only if we can get there…

This week we didn’t get to do a whole lot of work on the boat, I mean we worked, as you shall see but we did more riding our bikes through the insistent  snow than actual work on the boat.

Back at the community we loaded up the bike-trailer with all the pieces of Azek that we cut to form on Monday night. Then we rode. Just after the crack of dawn we rode from Groton to Noank on a thick carpet of freshly dropped frozen precipitation and unloaded the trailer at the marina about 45 minutes later. We had about an hour before Dena’s eye exam so we thought we’d put the new dry-goods shelf in place and do the fiberglass so it could dry while we were gone.

Then we rode to Mystic through the gently sloping Connecticut rivers edge. It snowed on us constantly the entire ride but it didn’t seem to matter much, the scenery was spectacular. When we got to Mystic Dena headed over to her eye-exam while I settled in at Bartleby’s for a relaxing day of reading and sipping coffee imported from the Mexican mountains. All the while it snowed, a light late winter feathering that covered the already picturesque town of Mystic painting a perfect postcard.

…And it was all day.

I (James) am reading a most fascinating book, Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. It’s about all the things that Neil Stephenson writes about, computer culture, codes and breaking them and the thing that I think stimulates him as a writer more than anything else, the concept of a Universal Machine. Cryptonomicon is a 918 page future door stop that helped me pass the time quite nicely, so, by the time Dena showed up just after dark my feet had thawed, my mind was stimulated, my ass was asleep and I was more than ready for the 6 mile ride back to the boat.

Sure enough, after the 12 miles to and from Mystic and my day of reading bliss it was nice to come home to a dry project that wasn’t fuming us out with the foul stench of off-gassing epoxy.

…And yet, we still couldn’t sleep. We both tossed and turned and took turns cozening up to the brutally cold hull all night long. In the morning we told each other stories of lucid-dreaming through out the night. I just couldn’t figure it out after all that riding you’d think we’d sleep like rocks but we got up as early as we could and went and did “the thing” at Carson’s greasy-spoon as soon as humanely possible.

As we’ve mentioned many times before one of our favorite things to do is to go to a used marine hardware store, or a chandler as they were known in days gone by, and sift though the bins of od’s-n-in’s for hours at a time looking for that unique little piece of gear that you just can’t find at your modern marine box-store. Well the closest one to us is in Mystic, of course, and they are not open on Monday’s and Tuesday’s.

If they had been open yesterday I wouldn’t have gotten to kick my feet up and sift my way through the brain of N. Stephenson so I wasn’t sweating the second bike  ride to Mystic in a week. The morning sun was shining and the melt from yesterdays snow was spraying off our tires covering us and our bikes with a thick salty coat of road grime that only helped to make us look that much more hard-fucking-core. By the time we got to the Mystic Marine Consignment store we looked as if we’d ridden from Baltimore just that morning.

It’s never a good idea to go to a chandler with a shopping list because you never really know what their going to have or how many of anything they might just happen to have in stock but this time we did have that list. We were prepared to go to the shop-n-box if we had to but we wanted to give the chandler a try first. We pulled out the big plastic bins of hing hardware and emptied them out on the concrete floor trying to find hinges for the four new hatches we’d cut for the new galley. We sat down and went to work right there in the middle of the isle with the marine toilets on one side of us and pintles and gudgeons on the other. An hour later, much to our pleasant surprise, we had a pile of hardware with everything we needed for the new galley hatches as well as a new latching system for our engine compartment, bonus… Gotta love a New England chandler in the middle of winter!

After paying less than half of what we would have given west-fucking-marine for the same shit we packed the trailer up with all the booty and rode back to the boat to build our new, fancy-schmancy galley drawer before we ran out of light and days off.

The ride to Noank was cool, wet and lovely much like the ride to Mystic, only more down hills on the way back!

The first project upon our return was to finish the shelf we started the night before.

We pre-drilled the holes in the Azek fastener-blocks forward and aft  and sank the fasteners in like this.

Then we gooped ‘em up with West Systems 610 and attached them to the shelf face. We also ran a bead of 610 between the face and the shelf and pre-drilled for some fasteners under the face.

Then we put it all together, like this…

It’s amazing how stiff Azek gets when it’s gooped up with 610!

After that it was time to build the drawer.

Back at the community we cut the drawer pieces to conform with the curve of the hull and the angle is pretty dramatic giving us a 10.5 cm variance from top to bottom. After we made the cuts we marked out the channels that had to be routed with a pencil, put the pieces in the bike trailer and hopped I didn’t crash on the way to the boat.

Two years ago I tried to give Dena an Ipad for her birthday and she returned it the next day and got a Bosch bit-router instead, boy am I glad she did that!

She’s such a geek with that thing!

That’s one tool we just can’t use down below. It turns Azek into a fine sharp dust that gets into everything!

I know you’re probably thinking, what’s the matter with this guy, is he afraid he’ll break a nail or some-shit?! So while she was looking all sexy with her router I was cutting the angle in the back of the drawer getting it ready to slide into the channels.

Her cuts were perfect!

After the channels were routed she pre-drilled for the left handed fasteners and I did the right handed ones, right down the center of the channel.

…610, of course.

Then as the sun came out once again we clamped the whole thing together, screwed in the fasteners and smoothed out the wonder-goo.

Damn, it was perfect! We just stood there staring at it with our mouths in shocked agape for several long moments…

Then we had to break out the Scottish single malt, pore up a couple of healthy shots in our new Noank’r mugs and toast us and another great weekend’s work!

… But first, let’s fix that bilge pump, lest we lose another night’s sleep!

Notice my (James’) new hair cut!  Doesn’t it look great with my hands in the bilge?

Lying awake in the middle of the night back at the community, I fantasized about how dreadful this job was going to be.  Covering my entire body with bilge muck, screaming and cussing, wishing that I could just…smoke a cigarette…take a shotgun and blow seven holes into the hull of that boat and just watch it sink…

With the Rule SuperSwitch, there’s a hole for a fastener at the forward end.  There’s also a notch under the float for a second fastener, in a place that is designed by a truly insane human being.  You cannot get to it with any tool.  You have to set the fastener up first…remember, this is in the oily, stinky, freezing bilge…put it at the perfect depth, slide the notch around the fastener, and then tighten the whole thing down with the forward fastener.

I’ve done this job before and it never takes less than 3 hours.  But this time, the old switch literally came apart in my hands.  It just disintegrated.  I set the screw at the perfect depth and slid the switch onto it the very first time.

I clipped all the wires down, hooked everything up, did all the shrink wrap, and the whole job took about an hour.

The most important thing about this picture: when using a very powerful hand tool, you should always look at your job.

But damn, I look good.

Did I mention I got a haircut?

There it is.  That’s all the bilge pump you’ll ever see.  In the upper left corner of the photo above?  That’s the bilge pump switch – with both auto and manual! – and oh, yeah.  It works perfectly.

And did you notice the 12.79 volts? That’s our solar panels working perfectly.

Next, let’s move all our shit.  Including the kitchen sink.

We had to move everything in order to get at the outboard corner of the bulkhead forward.  It was still raw fiberglass, and that had to change.  So I (Dena) got all up in there.

In case you’re wondering, I’m holding that piece of azek up with my knee while cutting a notch into a small chunk of azek.  The notch is the guide for the pencil (yes, that’s the other thing I’m holding) that marks the shape of the hull onto the big piece of azek.  So much harder to explain than it is to do.

With the shape of the hull marked, I got to use my favorite tool.  It’s been there for me through thick and thin (materials).  My Bosch jigsaw.  Again, not modeling the best in safety behaviors, what with using my legs as a table.  But there it is.  It worked.

This was the part of the (our) weekend where we pull all of the cabling back through the bulkhead in order to install that piece.  That meant disconnecting 110volt power, 12 volt power, propane, the radar, and the VHF coaxial antenna cable.

A very sad moment for me (James).  Being as though it was the most beautiful connection I’ve ever built in a coaxial cable.  It was the perfect length, no solder drips anywhere.  It looked like it came out of a factory, and I did it with my own two hands in a cramped environment.  Boo-fucking-hoo.  Clip.

As you see in the picture above, the piece that Dena cut and installed makes a smooth transition from the oak to azek.  Rather than run the electricity, propane, radar, etc all up in our shit like it was before, we’re routing it under the cabinetry through access ports that we drilled in a straight line all the way through each part of the cabinet from forward to aft.  Also, since we cut a 3″ hole, we won’t have to cut off any more perfectly hand made  connections.  Ever.  Again.

After working all day, we decided to celebrate.  This is us, celebrating.

We love being on the boat.

Today, we got up early, went to breakfast at our favorite place in Noank (Carson’s), and got to work.  We had originally planned to prime the first day and then paint the second day, because it was going to be so warm.  Instead, we spent the first day on the bilge switch and float switch, the bulkhead piece, the wiring, and the braces for the countertop.

Once we mocked it up, we really wanted to see exactly where all our new hatches were going to be.  We needed to know what kind of access we were going to have with all this new space.

Sure enough, putting the sink in place and loosely adding the plumbing created a gaping void between the hull and all that hardware.  We could put a shelf in, but we’re talking 10 or 12 cubic feet that we weren’t going to be able to access from the front.

Logic suggested that our other options were accessing it from the top or the sides.  We decided on both.

Two access hatches on the top (behind the sink) will allow us to load that shelf up with 50 pounds of rice, legumes, etc.  We’ll pull individual bags out from the side as we need to refill our stores.

The mockup also got us the exact sizes and positions of the big drawer, the door to the plumbing (and cleaning supplies storage), the seacock access hatch, and the other two fold-down hatches for the storage lockers under the stove and the new settee.

With all those pieces marked out, we added a salty touch – rounded corners a la This Old Boat magazine.

Then, well…we made the cuts.  Punching a slot with a drill bit just big enough for the jigsaw blade, then running that sucker around in circles over and over again.  In the end, we had 7 round-cornered rectangles in the bike cart’s bag and a total of 11 holes in the top and face of our cabinet.

This week’s work at the community: build the drawer, cut the shelf, make covers for all the hatches…and whatever else catches our fancy.

This is what we get when we’ve been gone for two days!

This week we took all of the measurements we’ve been doing over the past month and applied them to our sheets Azek.

Each sheet started out 4 feet by 8 feet and our working space is almost exactly 6 feet long  by a little under four feet wide so we had plenty of material to work with and then some for our drawers and cabinets that we will build into the installed unit.

The new sink is much bigger than the old one (74cm wide) and has a somewhat domestic appeal, it has two very large, very deep, pans. Instead of cutting one big hole for the sink we laid the sink out on the cut-out Azek, up-side-down, and drew out the hole cuts on the Azek. Then we measured them out for exactness. We punched a small hole, just big enough for the saw blade, in the Azek and cut the holes precisely the right size to fit the sink in, you’ll see why in a second.

After that we had to practically shave out little pieces with the jig-saw here and there to get the sink to fit but it did and we put it into place.

Then we mocked the whole thing up just like it will be on the boat.

As you can see, we used the sink cut-out pieces as lid-cutting boards for the sink pans. The right side of the image will be the new settee while the left cut-out will be the new place for the stove.

We rented a car and took all the pieces that are too big to fit in the bike trailer to the boat to fit them into place.

Once we got to the boat we discovered the bilge pump had stopped working so we had to dedicate the next 48 hours to dealing with that…

…To be continued!

Another wild week of working at an independent living senior retirement community.  For therapy, we go downstairs to the woodshop and prepare pieces of Azek for their new homes.

Last week, after we did all of the construction we wanted to do, we took a careful set of measurements.  We measured from the front of the cabinet to the hull every 5 cm.  Back at the community, we transferred those distances to a piece of Azek, then connected the dots to make a rough image of the hull.

With that done, the cuts were pretty straightforward.  Well, completely strange and curved, but not a problem.

Azek, a petroleum complex Poly Vinyl Chloride material that can be molded into almost any shape known to man, is perfect for modern boat construction because it sands easily, epoxy and fiberglass adhere to it, it cuts like butter with a jig saw and, best of all, it never rots.

See those serious looks on our faces?  If you look serious enough, it’s okay not to wear eye protection.  Wards off the little pieces that fly around at high speeds.

Anyway.

We also received a lovely new tool in the mail.  It’s a cart that attaches to the spindle for the back wheel of a bike.  So when the time came to ride our bikes to the boat, we loaded those cut pieces of Azek and our backpacks into the cart, hooked it up to James’ bike, and toddled off.

I (Dena) was so thrilled with this whole procedure that I cackled the whole way there.  Glowing, grinning, gloating.  We totally fucked over the oil industry today.  That’s a good day in my book.

This was only mildly complicated by the couple inches of snow on the ground.  It’s been pretty warm, so the snow was slushy underneath.  We took a slightly altered route, skipping the hard-core rocks and hills portion for a paved trail (which goes by a sewage plant – one reason we like the state park route better).

Before we could install those pieces of Azek, we got to do our favorite thing ever: move all our shit.  Since there was a freezing, sleetish rain, we had to shift things and secrete them into pockets all over the boat.  We’ve been putting them out in the cockpit, but nope.  Not today.

When we cut the pieces, we made them 5 cm too long so that we could match the shape of the hull precisely.  Now, we set the speed square to the amount we over-cut, then used that to mark the precise shape of the hull on the Azek.  Dragging it down the hull, holding a pencil at a precise angle against the Azek, and then cutting the piece and refitting it.

What comes after cutting?

Prepping the surface.

Each vertical piece got two braces.  We screwed them down to the shelf and then screwed the verticals to the braces, using West System 610 to fill any gaps and stick the whole thing together.

As we’ve been doing on this project, we fiberglassed the pieces to the hull.  This provides a nice longitudinal strength without making any holes in the actual, real, crucial hull material.

Oh look!  It’s all of our shit!

Last but not least, we measured for the top and front.  With the top in place, we can install the sink.  With the front in place, we can install the drawers we have planned.  These two next pieces will be nearly the end of this cabinet.

…Very serious, protecting us from the evil slivers of Azek!

The ice began its rapid melting process last Monday night and we were in the basement wood shop putting a new coat of paint on the Rutland 913 wind generator. We have discovered that even though our employment is not necessarily physically hard work, it is taxing none-the-less and riding to the boat on Monday night after work is just a little much. So we continued working on the projects that we have going here at the community.

I found a new (to me) bike on Craigslist for a couple of hundred bucks, a steal really, borrowed a car and went out to the middle of bum-fuck Rhode Island last Thursday to pick it up. I was stoked to put the new ride to the test on the muddy ice-melt through the Bluff Point State Park and Tuesday morning we made that happen. It was a blast! Dena rode my old bike, which we originally bought for her anyway, and had no problems riding through the goo.

My new bike, a 2010 Trek Wahoo with a single speed gear set-up, is pretty much built for me and it rides like a dream. It is a bit harder to deal with being as though I can’t rely on the 21 speed gear package my old bike pampered me with but I got used to it quickly and had a great time muddying it up on my first time out. By the time we got to the boat we were both covered in muck and laughing our asses off.

We got right to work…

As soon as I stepped on the boat I noticed that the batteries were completely dead! There wasn’t even enough power in the house bank to run the power meter. By the time Dena had stepped aboard I was running through all the system checks to try to figure out what had gone wrong. Ultimately, after much ado, we discovered that the charge controller for the solar panels had burned itself out (cheap piece of west marine shit) and reversed the charge thus sucking all the power out of our 8-D house battery. Luckily we have another battery, a five year old (soon to be replaced) starter battery for the engine.

So we decided to run the engine while we worked on the first step in the reconstruction of our home. For two hours we ran the diesel and that big-ass battery sucked up as much power as we could dish out of our 60 amp alternator. It went from 40 amps all the way down to 28 amps before we shut the engine down. It didn’t fill that big ol’ battery up by any stretch of the imagination but it gave us enough power to get the lights back on. We do have a small 110volt 2 amp battery maintainer that we hooked up and the charge controller for the wind generator also has a PV setting so we hooked the solar panels up to that and the system worked just fine.

While we were running the engine we took the stove and all the tools out of the cabin and moved them out into the cockpit.

Our favorite thing to do!

Then we pulled apart all the work we did last week (our second favorite thing to do) so we could cut out the underneath supports for the new cabinetry foundation.

After making two underneath-supports out of PVC plywood we attached them both to the underside of the newly trimmed-back foundation with 3, 3 inch stainless steel fasteners each. I went to work grinding down the old hull finish in preparation for the new fiberglass while Dena cut back the aft bulkhead to match the new lines and sanded the paint off the foundation top. By that time we had shut the engine down so then we did our third favorite thing in the world, we fiberglassed the foundation to the hull.

We filled the gap between the hull and the wood with loose-mat fiberglass and poured on 10 batches of epoxy. After that we laid in a 3 inch strip of glass tape and gooped another 10 batches of epoxy on top of that. Then we fit the lower supports in place and epoxied them with West Systems 610 (Wonder-Goop) and let me tell you, that fucker is bullet proof!

After the construction was done we put the stove and all the tools on the foundation as a realistic load and went hunting for some food while the epoxy dried.

We woofed a glorious meal, came back to the boat, opened the bottle of scotch and toasted a job truly well done.

The next day we filled the bolt-holes from the old windvane in the aft deck with epoxy and 610 and decided to be lazy and call it a short day.

We packed up our stuff in the back-packs and Dena went up to the head one last time before we took off. As I was walking away from the boat something caught my eye just below the surface of the water.  It looked like a bike tire… I stopped cold, looking down into the water and got chills running all the way up my spine!

For some reason it was an extraordinarily low tide and the sun was at just the perfect angle, allowing me to see all the way to the bottom underneath the boat… and there it was, Dena’s “stolen” bike sitting on its handlebars with its tires pointing straight up at me! Picking my jaw up off the dock I turned and saw Dena coming down the gangplank and all I could do was yell to her “Dena, you have to come see this!”

We both just stood there and laughed.

I grabbed the boat-hook off the deck of the boat, hooked the front wheel of her bike and pulled it to the surface.

The bike was in surprisingly good condition. We got it up on the dock after sloshing off some thick mud from the handlebars, set it upright and emptied out all the sea water onto the dock along with a very disgruntled little fish that Dena helped safely back into the cold, cold waters of the Fishers Island Sound.

After the bike drained out a bit we grabbed a couple of towels from the boat and wiped it down.

We got as many of the little, start-up barnacles off as we could being as though there isn’t any running water on the docks during the winter season and came to the conclusion that if we were going to save the bike from certain corrosive death she was going to have to ride it back to the community and clean it up there… So she did! Five miles through the sludge and the snow on a bike that had been under the sea for two whole weeks. When she got back home, without missing a beat, she systematically took that bike apart and scrubbed every last barnacle and anemone off of every single spoke, crank, and pedal.

She scrubbed and scrubbed well into the night until her beloved bike had been restored to its previous grandeur…

…And it has been. I’m sitting here writing this post looking at this bike right next to me in our living room and the thing looks practically brand new and I’m still just blown away by the way the story of our life together unfolds.

Just another lazy weekend on the boat, right?