Day 141, Year 6 Still Working Away
Date: Monday, March 14, 2011
Weather: Mostly Sunny Day; Wind E 10-15 knots
Air Temperature: Same, Same Everyday, 74 – 82 degrees F
Location: Prickly Bay, Grenada
I’m sitting here trying to figure out how such a small boat can take so long to clean. I am doing deep cleaning–washing the ceilings, walls, and floors, and reorganizing all of the storage cabinets–so I guess that explains part of it, but it still seems like we work for hours only to find we have hours more to do. And the laundry! Today I washed two beach towels, a queen-sized bed mattress cover, and a bed spread that had been used in the v-berth to protect the cushions. Add to that the normal laundry we accumulate in three or four days, and doing all this by hand takes me most of a morning. We did have time to get some boat maintenance work done. Mark sewed leather patches on our mainsail cover. Our original Doyle stack pack (mainsail cover) was replaced and redesigned in Langkawi. We love the redesigned cover, but it has one flaw. A stack pack cover is always up, even when you are sailing. You simply unzip it and raise the sail. But this one allows the cover to rub on the rigging when the mainsail is way out to one side of another when sailing downwind. And since that is the way we sailed for 44 days, holes were rubbed in the patches that Mark sewed on in South Africa. We are hoping that the leather he put on today is a little more durable. Mark also took off all the wooden Dorade boxes and stainless cowl vents. I got the stainless vents cleaned and the Dorade boxes sanded and ready to varnish. Mark also got the piece of teak today that we need to replace the top of the one Dorade that went overboard. He got that piece glued on and has started shaving the edges to make it match the other Dorades. I attacked the galley today and cleaned out the pot and pan storage area. I scrubbed the bottoms of all the stainless pots, so they are nice and shiny again. I also rolled up the long carpet runner that has been in our main cabin for the past five and half years. It was in place to protect the teak and holly flooring that we varnished before leaving Boston. But it has done its job and is going in the trash. We will have bare floors for now which are much easier to keep clean, so that’s a good thing.
Tomorrow morning I will drop Mark off on Laelia so he can help handle lines when they go into Spice Island Marine to be hauled out of the water. I will then take the dinghy to Spice Island Marine to pick him up once Laelia is out of the water. In the meantime, I will finish cleaning the main cabin and galley and get a first coat of varnish on those Dorade boxes. And then I’ll take the afternoon off cleaning to fix dinner. We have invited Howard and Judy for dinner to celebrate their successful haul-out Fixing dinner won’t take all afternoon, but the evening will start early as we have to go in to pick them up and take them home afterwards.
We heard from our friends Patsy and Eric Decker that their son Warren and family were not affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. That was good news. But then we thought of our friends Jean-Pierre and Colette of Safina who, last time we heard from them, were headed to Japan on their way back to the USA via the great circle route. We will email them tonight and hope that they are safe.
