Day 266, Year 6 Day of Rest–Not
Date: Sunday, July 17, 2011
Weather: Windy, Sunny, 80 degrees F–Beautiful
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
One thing leads to another, and what was planned to be a quiet day on the boat with just a little work ended up to be a full day of work. I think it can safely be said that Mark and I are incapable of resting, but despite the amount of work we got done, we did it in a relaxed manner and were outside enough to enjoy some of the beautiful weather.
Mark started out by hooking up the new hot water heater. Since we are out on a mooring and not plugged in to shore power, we have to run the engine to get warm water, but that is better than not being able to heat the water at all. The unfortunate thing is that we still have a slow water leak somewhere, so we need to keep searching for that. After hooking up the hot water heater, Mark glued down a piece of teak on the deck that had sprung loose. Our deck is in terrible shape and the teak either needs to be replaced or removed and replaced with fiberglass. Mark thinks that because the teak has worn down, it is just too thin to hold the caulking between the pieces of wood. We’ll think more about that this winter, but it was good to get the piece glued down. So far so good on Mark’s part, but then his frustrations began. He took down all the cockpit side curtains and removed the bimini to do a major sewing job. The canvas is just over two years old but already it needs to be restitched as the thread has not held up well. The zippers that hold the side curtains are coming loose and we desperately need to add pieces to keep water out in heavy rains. So he got everything down and started the repairs when he discovered that our SailRite sewing machine needs a tune-up. At first it would only sew in zigzag mode and when he got that fixed, he just couldn’t get the tension right. Mark was as frustrated as I have ever seen him, so I suggested that he put the machine away and put his energy into finding out where we can get the machine serviced. He has been able to do this himself for the past six years, but I think it is a time for a professional over-haul. We folded the bimini neatly, rolled the side curtains, and stored everything on the v-berth for a few days while we check out service possibilities. With the bimini down, we’ll get rain in the cockpit, so we also put all of the cockpit cushions inside on the v-berth. Hopefully we’ll get something resolved by next weekend. Mark works with a guy at West Marine who does canvas work in Falmouth, but Mark knows he is totally booked until the fall. But maybe he will know where we can get the machine serviced. So that project will be on the “to be continued” list.
I started my morning by finishing up some laundry and then taking the last food out of four milk crates that have been stacked in our forward head. We no longer need those for food storage and getting them off the boat will give us back our forward head. Some of the food needed to be put in a cabinet above our starboard settee, but when I opened that cabinet I discovered that everything on the bottom shelf was sitting in a sticky goo. I removed the food containers from the bottom shelf but didn’t find the source of the leak. Then Heather called and while I was sitting talking to her, I could see into the cabinet and discovered that the leak was coming from the top shelf. Some things are more evident from a distance than from up close. I had totally not noticed the drip point, but after removing things from the top shelf, the culprit showed itself. A can of pineapple had somehow sprung a leak on the side of the can and had slowly made a gooey mess. Then the “one thing leads to another” syndrome set in. I decided to remove any cans of food from that cabinet and put them with other canned food under the port settee. That required reshuffling everything in that storage area and recording what is now there. And that led to reorganizing another food storage area. I could have gone on and on as now that we are close to stores I don’t need to store nine months worth of food. But this reorganization is going to take time. I managed to spend most of the morning and all of the afternoon just working on four different storage areas. There are many more, so slowly but surely I’ll get the job done.
At 4 pm, both Mark and I decided to quit working on our never ending jobs, and we went to the town dock to get water to fill our water tanks. It was very windy and we just didn’t want to move the boat to the dock, so we made three trips with our water jerry jugs and partially filled one tank. That will get us through the week and then we’ll pick a quiet day to move the boat to the dock to fill both tanks. We had also taken some tarps and a boat cover out of the forward anchor chain locker and we took those to the town dock to wash down the bags and then took them to the WHOI dock to unload them and put them in the car. We’ll see if Heather and Jed have a need for them and if not, we’ll try to sell them at a yard sale later in the summer. While at the dock we met Steve and Irene. They live on a big sailboat on a dock next to the WHOI dock. People that Mark works with at West Marine have told him that we should meet and so we did today. They completed a two-year circumnavigation in 2004, returning to their home on Nevis in the Caribbean. They come here to work each summer and then return to Nevis in the fall. We didn’t have time to talk for long, but we will definitely have to get together with them soon to share stories. Eel Pond seems so small to be the home to two boats that have traveled around the world. We really must make an effort to meet more of the people moored here. Who knows what stories they have to tell?
