NZ Land Logs 50, Year 2: Beautiful Day Today–Rain On The Way
Date: Monday, April 9, 2007
Weather Today: Mostly Sunny, Temps in Low 70’s
Location: Whangarei, New Zealand
Today was Monday here, but Easter Sunday back in the US. We started our day by making a Skype call to talk with Mark’s brother and sisters in Florida. They were all together at Mary Ellen and Lee’s house, but unfortunately Mark’s sister Jeanie had already gone home by the time we called. After catching up on all the news from Florida we got ready to paint the epoxy on the waterline area that Mark has been sanding for two days. We got the epoxy mixed and then took time to make another Skype call to see that beautiful grandbaby of ours. He was a little fussy today, so the call was a little shorter than usual, but we still really enjoyed getting to see him. Jed’s parents were there and they reassured us that Sam had a great Easter day despite the evening fussiness. Evidently his best time of day is early morning, so Heather promised to look for us online and call us when he first gets up some morning so we can see the smiling, playful Sam. His 6 AM is our 10 PM, so we are looking forward to that Skype call some evening soon.
Mark got two coats of epoxy on the sanded swath around our waterline while I continued to work on scraping and polishing the prop and the metal fixture that holds the cutlass bearing through which the prop shaft goes. The paint shop here has a special paint that they will apply to all underwater metal once it is cleaned and this paint supposedly inhibits the growth of barnacles for almost a year. Everyone we have talked to that has had this done says it really works, so I guess all of the scraping and polishing will pay off in the end. The prop was cleaned and polished before we left Boston, so cleaning that was easy, but the other metal parts have years and years of bottom paint build-up. Cleaning that is a fairly tedious job and it was still not done at day’s end.
We cooked another one of our taste test dinners tonight and took it over to Ranger to eat. We have so many tools in the main cabin that there just isn’t room for four people to have a sit down dinner. Tonight’s taste test was Italian-style Bolognese sauce and it was a winner. This is a sauce that comes in a ready-to-boil bag. It was quite good and will make another easy-to-fix passage dinner. Marie of Ranger and I have now concluded our taste tests and are ready to finish our provisioning. We will do this when the weather is not good for boat work, and unfortunately it looks like that will be everyday between now and Saturday. We had a glorious day today with temps in the 70’s–great for drying that epoxy paint, but the forecast is for days of rain beginning tomorrow. We’ll just have to wait and see what Mother Nature throws our way.
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