Day 310, Year 10: Sanding and Scraping . . . The Hard Way
Date: Sunday, August 16, 2015
Weather: Hot and Sunny
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, North Falmouth, MA
First off, congratulations to Heather and Jed’s neighbor and good friend, Melissa, for completing the Falmouth Road Race today! Melissa’s goal was to make the seven miles without having to be sent to the medical tent and she made it. When we were having dinner together last night, Melissa shared her goal and we said our ‘road race’ goal for today was going to be completing the sanding and scraping away of varnish from the cockpit cap rail. Unlike Melissa, we didn’t make our goal. It was a frustrating day, to say the least. Our orbital sander seems to be on its last leg and you sand and sand, removing very little varnish. I definitely think it needs to be sent to the medical tent. And the wrong choice of scraping tool complicated the job further.
Our entire cockpit enclosure has been taken down for the sanding project, so there is no protection from the sun. And the sun was fierce this morning. I had barely gotten started when I realized we weren’t going to be able to continue without some protection. So I stopped and put up the piece of material we use as a sunscreen to immediately shield Mark. Then I worked on the harder job of putting up a tarp. Putting up the tarp meant taking other things down that are attached to the boom and, of course, they were not easy to get down. But eventually, with Mark’s help, we got the tarp up. Then I was sanding, oh so slowly, and Mark was using a tool for scraping the varnish off the rounded edges, oh so slowly. I had never seen the scraper Mark was using, but I just figured he was trying something new. In the afternoon, his fingers were hurting too much for him to continue, so we traded jobs. I assumed the scraper he was using was sharp, but it wasn’t. It just took brute force to scrape off the varnish. Without the proper tools, the job was just too hard. After nine frustrating hours, we both decided to quit. Mark will continue in the morning. We have done this job before with much less trouble and it wasn’t until we quit for the day that Mark dug out the scraping tool we have used in the past. Both of us had forgotten about it. We tried it out and it was sooooooo much easier. The cap rail is a flat piece of teak about three inches in width that sits on top of the cockpit coaming. If you are sitting in the cockpit, the coaming is like the back of the seat. The cap rail is rounded and overhangs the coaming on the outside edge. So you have to scrape off the varnish underneath and on the rounded edges rather than use a sander. Taking off all the layers of varnish is never easy, but today wins the prize for the hardest job ever because of our lack of proper tools. It won’t help with this job, but we will buy a new sander. And Mark will use the proper scraper tomorrow and might be finished with the job by noon. I’m not sure I’ll get a coat of varnish on tomorrow, but by Tuesday I should have at least one coat on. Slowly, ever so slowly, we will get this one job done.
We were too tired to cook dinner, so we went out to eat. Dinner at Stir Crazy (Cambodian food) was definitely the highlight of the day. We had hoped to come home and have a few minutes to relax before going to bed, but that was not to happen. While we were gone, a water hose under the sink in one of the bathrooms came loose and all the water in the water tank drained into the bilge. The bilge pumps are turned off since we are on land and are not supposed to be dumping water on the ground, so thankfully the tanks were close to empty. Mark worked on fixing the leak and I drained the bilge. Then we had to reconnect the hoses we used for washing the boat last week in order to refill the water tanks. We have to use about 275 feet of hose in order to reach a water source, and Mark had to walk the hose all the way down to the dock to connect it. No rest for the weary tonight.
