Poco a Poco
That means “little by little” to those of you with worse Spanish than me.
Well, Chris is 4 – make that 3 days into “Spring Cleaning 2012” and I’m reminded of that old saying “Two steps forward, one step back”.
Monday started off with a step back after Chris’s flight to D.C. was cancelled. Tuesday started off just like Monday, only this time Chris flew all the way to D.C. No plane issues, no luggage issues, no rental car issues, the boat was still where we left her, the new canvas looked great, and the new cushions really were as nice as they seemed in the pictures. I guess that would be two steps forward.
Dodger with special removable extension aft.
Come 3am Wednesday morning Chris was up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (the 6 hour time difference will do that for you) and headed up to New Jersey to her mom’s to pick up what turned out to be 3 vehicles worth of boat goodies. Fun! Back at the boat Chris and John confirmed that I am not a complete idiot. See, last December I installed a new Max-Prop. What I didn’t do was verify that the unusual gear reduction ratio was, in fact, what I was told it was, and I didn’t verify that the prop turns right-hand rotation, and I didn’t verify after installation that I’d actually set it up for right-hand rotation. My brain must have been very full that day as I didn’t even remember to take a picture of the shiny new Max-Prop. Over the winter I had a lot of time to think about how many ways I might have messed that one up. Turns out my idiocy, while still possibly in question, cannot be confirmed by the prop situation. The tranny and rotation all checked out. Yay! Check something off the list. Only 300+ more to go.
That's right. Right-hand rotation. No wait, that's left-hand rotation, but for reverse. Whew!
The big goal for Wednesday was to remove the bottom paint. Generally removing bottom paint is about the least enjoyable aspect of owning a boat, but Shearwater had a very thin coat of VC-17 bottom paint and I had no trouble finding people online, and even the distributor for the new bottom paint agreed, that VC-17 should come off easily with Isopropyl alcohol and a rag and if that doesn’t work use acetone. Wouldn’t that be dreamy? Yes, it would be a dream, as in pipe-dream. Alcohol didn’t touch it, acetone barely touched it, and thus Chris (and John and Jean) returned to the tried and true method of sanding off the bottom paint, turning what we hoped would be a few hour job into a full day job, made possible by enlisting two yard people with sanders to try and speed the process along. Ouch. Definitely a step back.
From this...
...to this.
Seriously...
Not all is lost though as Jean did a masterful job of replacing the non-skid on the companionway steps. If only all boat projects went that well…
Sometimes it the little things that make us smile.
Leave a Reply