Sovereign Nations

Let’s see.  Where were we?  Oh, right.  Bulkhead.

This is structural filler.  It’s also called cat hair, because it’s shortish strands of fiberglass chopped up and mixed into an epoxy resin.  It comes in a big can with a small squeeze tube of hardener (like bondo).  Its working time is only about 5 minutes, so I couldn’t make up batches that were too big.  Kept having to dig more out and mix it with more hardener.  I was doing all this by hand, so I went through a lot of gloves.  I like the feeling of it on my fingers, though.  Through the gloves, of course.

And on the back side.

Meanwhile, I decided that the wavy fiberglass near the settee was a drag.  Someone repaired the other side of the bulkhead at some point in the boat’s history, and the fiberglass was delaminated from the repair.  Or never had adhered.  One or the other.  So I chiseled out the stuff that wasn’t stuck.

This picture was taken after I filled some remaining gaps with epoxy mixed with colloidal silica.  That’s why it’s shiny.

What comes after applying structural filler?  Why, sanding structural filler, of course!

That’s a drag because of the fiberglass aspect.  It’s best to make the structural filler fit the repair as best possible, but I was hurrying and left some pretty good sized lumps.  The sanding blows fiberglass bits at me, so I gear up.

With the delaminated section and the filled section sanded, it was time for the fairing compound.  I like this stuff once it’s mixed into the epoxy, but it’s a light dust and I always end up coughing while I mix it up.  Oh – maybe I should try a dust mask…hmm…

The clamped-on wood was supposed to help make the shape match the tabbing on either side.  The wood was too thin, though, and it warped a bit in the middle.  Oh well…

And the delaminated sections below.

While I was doing the fairing, James was working on the compression bar.

He put a lot of work into that thing, and it looks great!

And when he was done there, he came aboard to see what I’d been up to.  It seems that fairing compound gives him the same urge as wet concrete…

The last post was about forming the patch at the top of the arch.  I got stymied when I couldn’t lever it into position.  Well, I cut the piece out and made this work.

As you can see, I’m trying to protect our living environment.  The plastic sheeting makes the cleanup easier, but it also keeps us from having the sanding dust sift into our sheets, where we won’t see it.  I’m not even sure if we feel it, really.  Directly, I mean.  It’s just, well, creepy.

The patch in the picture above isn’t fitting quite right, and the arch isn’t cut into it.  In order to shape it, I pulled out the following tools.

You can’t see the chisel, but it was in the mix somewhere.  I didn’t get pictures of the process, because working, right?  But basically, I fucked it into place and slipped the other piece under it.  Voila!

By the way, we were given this wood by a man named August.  He had a bunch of marine plywood left over from a project and gave it to James.

It’s rough, but the next step is structural filler, epoxy, and fiberglass.  Once those are all applied, we’ll be ready to do some finish work.

As usual, clean-up was a long process.  It involved more sawdust than fiberglass this time (yay!), which reminded me of one reason wooden boats are wonderful.

Last thing we wrote about the mast project, we were going to hang tight through Irene and then get back to it.  As we posted, the hurricane wasn’t so bad up here in Fells Point.  When I got back to work, I pulled out the grinder again.

I wish I’d gotten pictures of it, but…I taped thick plastic sheeting all around my work zone, trying to contain the fiberglass dust I would create.  It was not a complete success.  Three straight lines with the grinder = 5 min.  Set up and clean up = hours.

Fiberglass dust makes you itch – it irritates your skin – it hurts!  So I filled a bucket with water and wiped down every single surface that got dusty, from the cabin top to the cabin sole.  It was far more of a cleaning than I felt like doing, but I made the mess.

The whole reason I made those cuts?  In the picture below, you can see that I had chiseled the lower part of the plywood.  I got up to the fiberglass tabs that fix the bulkhead to the cabin top and wow.  The wood wasn’t rotten enough to come out!

The wood is obviously not in the pink of health, but it was too strong for me.  The arch is the part I removed with the grinder.

And then I chiseled.  Oh my.  I kept turning away, thinking there was a quicker way.  If there is, I don’t know it, so I turned back to the job and got it done.

And then I cut the piece that would replace the old plywood.  I made patterns of the front and back, transferred those to a piece of plywood, and got out the jigsaw.  I love the jigsaw.  It makes such disciplined cuts, for a freehand tool.  However, I got fancy and tried to get the poor jigsaw to behave in an undignified manner.  I tried to angle it manually in mid-cut.  And I burned the wood and the blade.

That picture’s actually from after I used the Dremel to take off the knob that was left.

And then I went to fit this in place, figuring I would need to do a bunch of subtle shaping to make it fit perfectly.

Except it doesn’t fit!  I mean, it might fit when I can get it into place, but there’s no way to lever it into the groove between the two existing pieces of plywood.

Major bummer!

I put the project aside so I could ponder.  What I’ve come up with – I’ll cut a rectangle out of the good wood underneath (the darker stuff in the picture).  Then I’ll pound the top piece in place from underneath and push the other piece in place afterward.  It’s not ideal, but it’s the kind of thing I sometimes do on this boat.

Of course, when I walked to the hardware store to get a thinner grinder wheel for the cut…well, it’s Labor Day.  They were closed.

So another day with very little accomplished.  Ah well, I did get some writing done!

I’m sure you think James looks younger and/or thinner, but he’s already heard it.  Just stick with superlatives regarding his handsomeness.

Before:

After:

Ms Irene wasn’t that mean after all.  No spankings were administered.

When last you saw us, we looked like this:

Once the mast was secure on the dock and the storm passed, it was time to remove the mast step.  In order to do so, we first had to remove the compression posts below decks.

In the picture above, the compression posts are the pieces of wood standing vertical.  They have a curve to them that makes them wider at the top.  Note the bar sitting across them at the top.  The mast step is bolted to the deck via the holes you can see (sort of) in the picture, but two of the bolts come through the mast step, through the deck, and through the compression bar, where the washers and nuts appear.  Of course, you can’t see that, because the compression posts are right underneath those nuts.  This is the whole reason we have to take everything apart – because we couldn’t tighten the bolts from the top and we couldn’t get to the nuts from below.

The compression posts are well supported by the bulkheads (one of which is cracked, remember?) and so we commenced to scraping paint away where we thought the fasteners would be.  Then we dug out the bondo-type filler someone had packed on top of the screw heads.  Then we tried to move 50 year old bronze fasteners in damp, swollen wood.  Every fastener was an adventure.

Turns out the compression posts were attached to the bulkhead, but also to the door frame for the head.  We ended up struggling 24 of these fasteners out of the two posts.

Once we had all the fasteners out, the posts creaked their way free.  First the aft post…

Note that the wood is darker at the top – that’s where water has been leaking in.  The posts are bad-ass oak, so they’ll be fine.

The forward post was a pain in the ass to remove because the fasteners had been fiberglassed over when a previous owner had altered the forepeak.  Our Chesapeake has a double berth rather than the usual v-berth, with a cabinet to the starboard side.  When we finally cussed our way through that process, James pulled the post, which looks to be in fabulous health.  Yay!

And that gave us access to the hidden nuts.  Some very light sweating got all but one bolt out.  The bolt that had pulled up in our knock-down was a mess because we tried so hard to get it to re-seat.  Eventually, with somewhat heavier sweating and slight sharpening of tone between us, we got that damn thing out.

Chisel and scraper brought the mast step loose.  It was not bedded with an adhesive, just with Dolfinite.

With the mast step unbolted and removed, we could now knock the compression bar loose.  It isn’t fastened directly to the deck, only to the mast step.  These three pieces of oak are getting the royal treatment.  We figure we’ll put a clear sealant on them and always know their state of health at a glance.  It’s not like UV is a problem up under there!

I took the head’s door frame apart and chiseled out the delaminated fiberglass skin that covered the bulkhead.  Anywhere the fiberglass has rippled, there’s likely to be some reason, so I wanted to see all of it.

Not bad.  This side isn’t wet and molded.  It’s been under a lot of pressure, but I think it will be fine once the other repairs are made.

Not good.  But I expected it.  This side is wet and needs to be replaced as part of the repair.  I didn’t cut up any higher because that section is very thick (it’s called tabbing, and it’s extra fiberglass that holds the bulkhead to the cabin top).  And here’s the other side:

You can see the corresponding rot on this side, though I put the door frame back on before taking the pictures.  The wood on the right of the photo is fine, though.  The plan is to cut the tabbing and chisel out the plywood about three inches back from the rot on one side and about four inches back from the crack on the other.  Once that wood is replaced, the bulkhead should have most of its strength back…except…well, that will wait until below.

And the other bulkhead looks fine.

No rot, doesn’t give when I poke it with an ice pick.  Good stuff.

The propane tank used to be under the mast, but that was a sucky place for it.  We moved it to the aft deck and left the bolts as they were.  Turns out this was not the best move – the area around the bolts was sopping wet.  That’s okay – it’s a honeycomb material and doesn’t rot, exactly.  It’s strange stuff, but we didn’t want any more water getting in there.  We allowed all that to dry for a few days and it seemed fine when we moved on.

One of the things I love about working on boats – things make sense.  We’re not dealing with cosmic string theory or – horrors – weather prediction.  This is very physical and, usually, something that’s a great idea will make sense to me.  One example.  I’ve read on many sites that, when bolting something through a cored deck, one ought to give the hole special treatment.  This involves digging the core material out around the hole, creating a void between the top and bottom fiberglass skins.  Then one tapes the bottom and fills the hole with epoxy (nice and runny) so that it will soak into the core material and get the fiberglass skins nice and wet.  Then one pokes a hole in the tape and reclaims the epoxy, which gets a filler added called colloidal silica.  This makes it very hard and durable.  The mixed epoxy/filler goes back into the hole from the top (don’t forget fresh tape to cover the hole that was poked in the old tape) and is allowed to cure.  When this hole is redrilled, it leaves a plug of filler epoxy.  That way any water that sneaks in around the bolt – it can’t get to the core!  Shazam!

We drilled out, reamed out, and filled the old propane bolt holes, the old propane hose hole, the hole I made for the extra solar panel connector, and all of the mast step holes.  When we filled the holes, some of them took so much epoxy that we were shocked.  That means that the epoxy was running through the core material, filling up holes and voids, and hopefully saturating any bad wood.

See the places that are yellow, where I pulled the paint off?  Having the mast off the boat has made the whole thing flex some – back into its original configuration, we hope.  Those places, the epoxy coat under the paint cracked with the flexing and I scraped the loose bits off.  Strange part – some of the thickened epoxy seeped from those spots – must have been weak, eh?

Another thing that came to light as the cabin top flexed – it seems that someone recored a portion of the cabin top.  I believe this photo shows the edges of a repair that was done with the mast in place, meaning that the cabin top was flexed down.  When we pulled the mast, the repair kept its flexed-down shape.

Great – way to repair the boat, previous owner!  Except…this boat spent a long time in Florida, where (I hear) it gets hot.  Heat makes epoxy cure faster.  Some people try to extend the working time (pot time) of epoxy by mixing less hardener into the resin.  I do believe that this was a weakness of the previous owner, because the areas that have been exposed by this flexing?  All sticky.  Like they NEVER FULLY CURED.  Not in all the years since the epoxy was mixed.  This is not cool; I am not copacetic.

Don’t do this.  Okay?

Ahem.

Another aspect of the cabin top flex – all our doors are closing better now.  Including the companionway.  I’ve known that the companionway was the next big project, but the de-flex has turned it into a smaller project than I’d anticipated.  Rather than having to take it all apart and do a complete rebuild, we can repair the crack that developed over the last few months.  Yay!

So here’s the crack after I ground down the surrounding fiberglass and filler, and pulled out the loose filler in the thick spots.

Oooooh – so that’s why it’s been leaking?  Yup.

This got a good sanding and then James mixed up a batch of structural filler, which stinks like sin but works like the heavenly host.  Or vice versa.

This part is practically done!  Except that sanding that shit is hard.  Oh well.  At least it’s not leaking.

And now for the big-badness.  The fugly part.  The scary bulkhead.

We realized that this bulkhead was scary a little while back.  It’s not hard to figure out.  It flies its scary-flag high and proud.

This weirdness is the other reason we knew we’d have the mast off for a while.  The bulkhead isn’t under pressure with the mast down, so it’s the right time to figure out how extensive this badness is.  To give you an idea of the information we started with, the empty dark space under the not-so-good-looking plywood?  That gets really soaked with water.  Like, glisteny.  And it’s really soft.

So it was time to explore the scary bulkhead.  I deconstructed the cabinet face and two of the shelves inside in order to chisel out a section of fiberglass.  And this is what I got.

In the trash can (also the crab pot, were we to catch crabs), you can see the fiberglass I removed.  The odd shape that is dark with rot.  Yep.  Also in the can and in front of the can – the former plywood.

As an exploratory foray, this worked just fine.  It showed us that the bulkhead is rotten against the hull.  We don’t know how far the rot continues as the hull curves, but we’re figuring that it goes pretty far.  Also, we’re going to have to remove the plywood up quite a bit higher than I’d hoped – see how the middle of the plywood is more rotten than the outside?  I will be excavating a lot of this bulkhead.

And just to pound this home.  This is the wonderful soil that used to be plywood.

I didn’t hyperventilate.  Instead, I tore the head compartment apart.  I wanted to know what that side looked like.  Would we need to remove the entire bulkhead?

Nope.  The port side must have rotted a while back.  Someone already replaced the plywood on that side.  But check out the size and shape of the dark portions – that’s a pretty good sign of how much material I’ll have to replace on the rotten side.

In order to do the bulkhead repair, I’m going to have to cut the water fill.  It’s PVC, not hose, so I’ll cut and cap it, then use couplers to put it back together afterward.

I was raring to go, not really thinking about anything but getting this project done, when James slapped me in the face with a wet fish.

The wet fish has a name.

She’s called Ms Irene.  And she’s a hurricane coming up the East Coast bringing tropical storm winds and a storm surge that will flood every basement within a 1/4 mile of the waterfront.  Or not.  Either way, we’re not tearing anything else apart until she spanks us and passes on by.

Because guess what.  You don’t want a hurricane to hit when the boat looks like this:

See how happy I am?  Why am I so happy?  I don’t think this post will really answer that question…so it must be because I love the photographer.

What is that, you ask?  Why it’s the crack in the bulkhead under our mast.  I uncovered it a little while back when I took the veneer off.  That’s the forward side.  The aft side is no better.

That is also the reason for this post.

Remember way back when?  When we got knocked down and broke the port side forward lower chainplate right in half.  Weeeeelll, that also had the effect of pulling loose the bolts holding down the mast step.  We tried tightening, we tried loosening.  We learned that two of the bolts were installed between the horizontal and vertical parts of the compression system.

Invisible.

And untouchable.  In order to re-seat the step, we were going to have to take apart the compression system.  Which you don’t want to do with the mast in place.

So we researched getting the mast pulled and every yard we talked to quoted megabucks.  The last quote was such an insult that we left the marina we were berthed in, in order to get away from the madness.

Then we read about and discussed pulling the mast using a buddy boat (I’d do it with two boats, but our one “buddy” wasn’t really an option).  And then it was all about building an a-frame mast tower on the deck.

There are plenty of resources about doing this already on the web.  Suffice to say, we went and bought some 2x4s and a bunch of big ol’ bolts.

And we cut and we bolted.  After wrestling this contraption onto the deck, we attached the mainsheet rig to the apex and prepared to haul it up against the mast.

And up it went…

TOO SHORT!

The rig was beautiful and would have worked perfectly.  It was completely stable fore and aft, port and starboard.  But alas.  It was too goddamn short.

We needed to be able to pull from several feet above the spreaders, but this thing barely reached them.  So it was back to square one.  Now that we’d moved the boat, however, the nearest boatyard was Tidewater Yacht Services.  So perhaps that other yard did us a favor by running us out of their marina with their silliness.

On our way in, we had some military scenery.

Ominous, yes?  Those guys are always good with the names.

And we met a yard worker named James, who drove the crane over and left.  We waited for the yard’s rigger.

The whole experience was fantastic, once it got going.  The workers were efficient and treated us with respect.  We’re the kind of boaters who want to do our own work and many other yards wouldn’t have let us aboard, let alone take part in the mast’s actual removal.

You are looking at James (right) and Steve from Tidewater Yacht Service.    Steve is the rigger and James seems to be a crane operator, though I doubt that’s the extent of it.  For one thing, he climbed our rickety ratlines after they’d been disconnected from the chainplates and were hanging loose at the bottom.  This was a nerve-wracking procedure.

The crane is in place, the rig is loose, and the lower shrouds are disconnected.

The two Jameses worked together on disconnecting the aft stay.  Removing the SSB antenna from the insulator at the base of the backstay was a bit of a science project.

The last stage was removing the upper shrouds, and he’s still smiling.

I guided the wires through the pipe between the mast and inside the boat, then ran back on deck to get the photo above.  With the backstay removed and the forestay, roller furler, and foil pulled to the mast, the crane lifted the weight of the mast straight up.  The aluminum extrusion slid out of the stainless step without a hitch.

James and Steve guided the base of the mast toward the bow and the other James lowered the weight of the mast directly onto the hard dodger.  It worked.  There were handshakes and thanks, some flashing of plastic money, and we motored back to our slip.

We stripped the mast of all parts that could get caught on things as we maneuvered it off the boat.

We marked all the pieces as we took them off: spreaders, stays, shrouds, topping lift, and all the halyards.

While removing the halyards, we had to leave pull lines in the masthead.  Leading the halyards over the sheaves with no line?  Not to be considered.

We left this block because we were going to use it later…keep your eyes peeled.

Looking up the mast from the base, it looks like it’s in pretty good shape.  The wires are in good condition and it’ll be easy to put that back together.

Next step – get the mast off the boat.  This is a big deal.  This is two people maneuvering hundreds of pounds of expensive bulk from one moving surface to another moving surface during peak water-taxi hours.  Meaning: wake.

We get tossed around a fair bit in this slip, and we knew we couldn’t count on a calm spell.  We had to be ready to keep working and protect the mast and boat as best we could.  So we didn’t take any pictures during that part.  So sue me.

The answer was to use the toerail as the fulcrum point and then treat the mast like a lever.  We slid it forward until it touched the ground and then heaved the high side off the boat.

This is how heavy that mast was:

Taking the mast and rigging off raised our waterline by three inches!

Once the mast was on the dock (so much easier said than done), we had to move it into position.  Note the whisker pole topping lift sheave – the one you’ve already seen.

We had to pull the mast onto the finger pier so that it wouldn’t block traffic and so that we could make sure it didn’t get bounced into the water.  Shiver.

Our boat is in bits and pieces, but they’re well-secured bits and tightly tied pieces.

Then the storm hit and we took the rest of the day off.  Next, removing the mast step from the deck.

Puff chasing, we made our way from Frog Mortar Creek out to Middle River and down to Hart-Miller island.  The wind died altogether as we rounded Pooles Island and, on glass, we motored to our anchorage for the night.

Fairlee Creek is known to be a tricky place to enter.  There’s a nice big red marker and then a flurry of small red and green cans that end just before the pinch.  The pinch being a 90 degree turn into a shallow spot between two beaches that are 20 feet apart.  That part?  We get to figure that part our ourselves.

This is the narrowest entrance that we’ve been through, and we didn’t go through without a small amount of travail.  We bumped, we grounded, and then a nice man waded out to us and asked, “How much water to you need to float this boat?”

Dena’s response was, “Oh, honey, you are so sunburned!”

The nice man was unphased by that comment.  He seemed inured to the pain of red skin.  Perhaps it was a permanent color rather than a summer thing.

He shoved and shoved, and lo and behold, we floated right off that shoal.  Motoring gently, we entered the beautiful bay of Fairlee Creek, where the depths range between 8′ and 5′.

We set the anchor about mid-way through the main bay, maintaining some distance from the black Rinker from which issued cheesy music and screaming kids.

The hot, still air called for swimming, and I was not to be stopped.  When I realized I was starving, James helped me out…

And then he jumped in as well!

We floated around, swam, and watched the boat turn with the tide.  Happy with our holding, we launched the dink and James rowed us to the spit that hooks around to protect the bay.

We got out to walk the beach and pulled the dink up on the pebbles of the protected side.  The Bay side of the spit was a rocky, tan sand

I came back so James could see this weird piece of metal.

And sat quietly, minding the dingy and letting myself soak up the peacefulness of the place.

The large sign screaming BAR made us want to slake our thirst and we rowed over for a meal and some drinks.  But alas – the place is only open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Sigh.

This is what we saw when we came back down to the dock, and the vision was enough to make us happy we gave it a try.

Still water and slight wind allowed us a very peaceful night’s sleep, though it was too hot to share the v-berth.  One in the berth and one on the settee, we slept deeply and well.  We woke at 7am so that we could ride the high tide during the slack current leaving Fairlee Creek and this time, we beat the channel!

The osprey put on a little show as we gained the red marker.

Then we were out and sailing!  We had great wind all the way across the bay, on a broad reach and kicking 5 knots in about 5-10 knots of wind.  It was a great example of efficient use of the breeze.

Entering the mouth of the Patapsco River, the wind began to die and we turned to run before it.  We kept the jib up and full until we got past the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

But we had to roll it up and motor before we hit Ft McHenry.

We tied up to the t-head at the dock and rowed our slip-lord’s Boston Whaler to a different spot before taking our accustomed position in Belt’s Wharf, Fells Point, Baltimore, MD.  And here we are, home again home again.

We almost died!

No, we didn’t.  We had a great, wonderful, amazing three-day sail and do-nothing vacation.

But that doesn’t make the best story, eh?

So here’s what happened.

The trip started out ten minutes before we left the dock.  James got the call that told him he wouldn’t be managing the Port Townsend West Marine, a position he’d done a phone interview for and didn’t really want.  I was at the marina’s head and he’d forgotten about it by the time I got back to the boat.

That was a representative moment.  We left this dock and left our usual mindsets and worries behind.  Literally.

We put up sails where Frog Mortar Creek empties into Middle River.  After three hours of tacking between Hart-Miller Island and Pooles Island, we sailed, laughing, through three squalls.

Just after the first squall, we decided to gybe and pull a reef in the main.  We made the gybe safely but had the sails in too tight for the next maneuver.  Our now-considerable experience with being quickly overwhelmed by wind in this boat kept us alive to what we were doing, and as soon as the rig registered the tension, as soon as the sails groaned and the boat heeled to 20 degrees, James tossed off the jib sheet and Dena released the main.

There.  Done.

One exciting moment averted.

James went forward and pulled the reef in.  He got the forward three reef ties and Dena got the aft two.  By the time we had the boat broad to the wind again, it had eased.  We exchanged wry grins and shook the reef back out.

The rest of our sailing was characterized by rain that obscured the Eastern Shore, followed by glorious jesus beams and the blur of timelessness.  We didn’t keep track of how long we’d been out, and weren’t all that concerned with exactly when we’d arrive.  We’d get there when the boat got us there, and we hoped it was before dark.

We arrived around 7pm in full daylight and nosed into the north side of Swan Creek.  The chart showed the major buoys, but someone had added two red cans at the first big curve and shoal and three green cans at the second.  We did sounding on the shore side of the green cans and then in the bend right before them.  We dropped the main anchor, a 25 pound Bruce, in 8 feet of water, paid out the chain and set it hard.  Adding a bunch of rode put us riding back in 5 feet and we felt like that was plenty.

Dena was forced by her overweening sense of responsibility to dive in and try to check the anchor.  AKA, Dena went swimming.  The water was murky and the anchor wasn’t visible, but she did find out that we’ll need the zinc on the prop shaft replaced soon.

We made cocktails from Absolute Citron and Lipton Half and Half (lemonade and tea).  We sat in the cockpit as the light faded from the sky and shared our first Cuban cigar.  That set the stage for the rest of the 36 hours we spent there.

It was perfect.

Our day off had perfect wind, perfect sun, perfect temperature and humidity.  We made enough power to run everything, even the refrigerator, and it confirmed that we can live like that.

We swam and drank.  Dena read aloud from The Sotweed Factor, by John Barth, which is written in 18th century prose and is laugh-out-loud funny.  We both slathered sunscreen on all day and still got minor sunburns.

The hardest work we did was sailing our dinghy to the nearest marina for ice.  Even the ride back from that was perfect sailing, the wind taking us back to the boat in two tacks.

Highlight of the day: Dena taking off her swimsuit bottoms and a poor little fish falling out.  It was stunned, with a look as though it had seen god on its tiny little fishy face.

The wind changed during the day and we got closer to the shoal to the east.   James discovered this fact when he jumped from the dinghy into the water onto a pile of rocks.  We used low tech sounding equipment to find the depths all around the boat (finding bottom with our feet and holding our hands up to show the depth).  We decided we were alright because of the flooding tide, but needed to keep an eye out.

As the wind picked up and dark fell, we took fixes on multiple points on shore so we’d know if we moved.  We expected to swing in a semi-circle around the anchor as the tide changed, but needed to keep off the shoal.  A beautiful night, talking and drinking.  When we decided to go to bed, the boat had swung a bit closer to shore and Dena felt edgy about it.  After very little time in our berth, we got back up and decided we needed to put out our second anchor.

We dug the Fortress anchor out from the lazarette and grabbed the longest line we had.  Dena got in the little boat and rowed to the bow while James tied the line to the anchor with a bowline.  He paid out the rode while Dena stroked her way out toward the channel.  The Fortress got tossed off the stern of the dinghy, James hauled in until it set, and Dena rowed back to the boat.  It was more simple than either of us could believe and we slept like rocks all the windy night.

When we arose, the boat had swung and we now had our two anchors strung out before us.  All of the tension was on the Fortress, but the two rodes hadn’t tangled, so we were perfectly satisfied.  We rowed to the marina and left the dinghy there.  We didn’t feel like cleaning up after ourselves, so we got directions from a local dog-walker to the nearest greasy spoon (Pasta Plus?) and made the mile and a half walk.  Though it was nice to stretch our legs, we were perfectly happy being back on the boat.

One more swim for Dena and we started cleaning up to go.  The boat was back together, dinghy on deck, and we were underway by noon.  That’s after us talking about fucking off as much of the day as possible.  There just wasn’t that much work.

Sails up just past the last green, wind generator making power, solar panels gleaming, the wind blowing at 10-15 knots and pushing us to hull speed.

We made long tacks from one side of the bay to the other and backed into our slip at Maryland Marina around 5pm on Friday.  Yet another cover band was massacring music that wasn’t good in the original versions and we ate, showered, and slept, but not as peacefully or as enjoyably as we had at anchor in Rock Hall.

(Psst.  This is the last of series.  Want to read it from the beginning?  Click here.)

Before getting too crazy with the painting, we needed to deal with the fact that there were no longer any holes for cockpit drains.  Old holes, still somewhat weakening the cockpit sole?  Check.  Old messy gross stuff that was terrible the remove?  Check.

In order to put the new drains in exactly the place of the old ones, I used a hole saw that was big enough to go around the remainder of the old drain under the sole.  In case you think I’m overstating my irritation, this is what it looked like:

I used the hole saw to center the drill bit and get a hole started.  I then switched to a plain drill bit and punched the hole all the way through the new cockpit sole.  Moving out to the cockpit, I used that drill bit hole to start the properly sized hole saw and made a nice big hole in our brand new cockpit sole.  Sigh.

After cutting the second hole the same way as the first and cleaning up the terrible mess that resulted, I finally found a good use for the Dremel.  The new drain has a countersunk head, but it’s over 2 inches wide and there isn’t a simple way to match that curve.  If you know of one, tell me in the comments.  I’m calm enough now that I won’t tear your head off.

After creating a slope that pretty much matched the drain, I taped the head and trimmed the tape to exactly match the head.  I also made nifty little tabs so I could remove the tape, even if I got filler on it.

A mix of colloidal silica and low-density filler gave me some strength while maintaining ease of sanding, and I packed that shit onto the slope and all around/against the drain fitting.  Pressing it into place, some squished out the top and some filled part of the depth of the hole.  It was a pretty slick operation, yielding this;

And then this:

And then this:

If you have sharp eyes, you may have spotted the fact that the first two shots are different from the third.  The first two are the starboard drain – last is the port side.

After sanding fair, it looks great.

That picture also shows that I kept building up the epoxy base around the fuel fill.

While the project continued above decks, I was also in the bowels far below, replacing the nightmare of 4 different hoses in less than 3 feet, each connected to the next with substandard hose clamps.  Since the drain is 1 1/2 inches and the seacock is 1 1/4″, I still had a coupler/reducer in the mix, but this is still a huge improvement.

The seacocks are not working properly and will be replaced during our next haulout.  It looks good nonetheless!

And just so I can get some sympathy, this is the workspace in which I did the foregoing.

Not for the short armed or easily bruised, since one must lay on the engine in order to do anything behind it.

Well, after a few coats of paint (more to follow after our mini-vacation – sailing to Rock Hall), the boat looks great.

Everyone on the dock has complimented me on the lovely work we’ve done.  I sense more pity than awe from some people, but that’s okay.  Maybe they’ll hire me for the jobs they think they’re too good for!

We have to freshen the rest of the cockpit paint – the contrast is too ugly!  For the moment, I painted the cabin top under the dodger and the aft bulkhead.  The rest will wait until we get back.

And we’re feeling back to normal.

Except one minor problem.  In all the epoxy slinging, I got overexcited and ended up with large gobs in my hair.  The one thing that’s not better than before is my haircut!