Day 295, Year 10: Beginning Boat Maintenance
Date: Saturday, August 1, 2015—Can’t believe it is August.
Weather: Another Lovely Summer Day
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, North Falmouth, MA
“Bob the Builder, can we fix it?
Bob the Builder, yes, we can!”
‘Bob the Builder’ is a British animated children’s television show that has been very popular with little ones for a number of years. Bob is a building contractor who always gets the job done. I hear Ollie and Jonah singing the ‘Bob the Builder’ song all the time and today I needed their enthusiasm to convince myself that we can do all of the maintenance projects that need to be completed while we are out of water. Over the past few months, we have just not kept up with regular maintenance, so it is time to get our lazy selves moving and get things done. We’ll just have to replace ‘Bob the Builder’ with ‘Mark and Judy’ and sing that little ditty until all the jobs are done!
The first big job is stripping and re-varnishing the cockpit cap rail. Somehow moisture got trapped under the varnish and it lifted around the winches. So today Mark and I started peeling and sanding away the lifted varnish. We have decided to start by stripping the varnish only in the areas where it lifted. We will try to fare in new layers of varnish and hope the old and the new will melt together seamlessly. But if not, we will strip the whole thing. The last time I varnished I did not have Epifanes Rapid Clear which is what I always use for the first five coats. It is not available here on the Cape, so I just used Epifanes Clear Varnish and thinned it for the first coats. Evidently that was my problem. So I have ordered Rapid Clear from Amazon and it should arrive on Monday. Hopefully sometime this week I will have time to do an experimental coat to see how the old and the new will look when blended. But as with everything, there is always something else that needs to be done before the main job can be tackled. So today, in order to get ready to strip the varnish, we needed to take down the side and back curtains in the cockpit and store them away while we are working. These ‘curtains’ are clear plastic sewn into canvas (Sunbrella) frames. Both the canvas frames and clear plastic needed to be cleaned before storing them away, but I decided to just polish the plastic and leave cleaning the canvas until later. I polished the plastic and Mark got the side curtains stored away neatly in the v-berth. Then we started the varnish stripping job. It took all afternoon to do just the two small areas and we are still not quite done. Finishing the stripping and preparing to varnish will be tomorrow’s jobs. The Rapid Clear will arrive on Monday, so maybe sometime Tuesday I can get the first coat on. The other two projects that need to be done are polishing the top sides and re-stitching the plastic side-curtains. The thread in the side curtains has deteriorated and there are places where the stitching is just no longer there. Polishing the top sides means waxing the sides of the boat from the deck down to the water line and that takes lots of energy. Between Mark’s shoulder issue and his sensitivity to the sun from the chemo, he really can’t do this job. So I will give it my best shot while he works on sewing the canvas. But the next problem is finding the time to do all of this. Next weekend we are going to New York to visit our good friends, Ed and Lynne Kirwin. We thought we would go to Maine and New Hampshire the following weekend to visit friends and family, but we are going to cancel that trip so that we can get the boat maintenance jobs completed before Windbird goes back in the water. I’ll just keep humming that ‘Bob the Builder’ song, emphasizing “We can do it.”
On the brighter side of life, we enjoyed our overnight at Heather and Jed’s. Heather made a fantastic breakfast for us, and after breakfast, we returned to Windbird. But Heather convinced us to return for dinner. Matt, a new post-doc that works with Jed, and his wife Cristie, were also invited to dinner and we had a delightful evening. Matt is quite the fisherman and we are hoping to get him and Cristie out on Windbird sometime in September to give us some pointers on fishing in Cape Cod waters.
