Day 215, Year 7: Getting Ready to Move Windbird
Date: Sunday, June 10, 2012
Weather: Beautiful, Sunny Day; Temp 76 degrees F
Location: At Heather and Jed’s in E Falmouth, MA
Working alone is just no fun, but it surely gives you a chance to know just
how much you miss the other half of your team-and it also clearly points out
just how much you don’t know. Mark worked at West Marine today, so I worked
on Windbird all alone. Mark and I always work as a team. He has his ‘blue’
jobs and I have my ‘pink’ jobs, and both assist the other. I took Mark to
work, came back to Heather’s and had a lovely pancake breakfast with Heather
and the boys (Jed was at a work-related breakfast), and then I headed to
Windbird. My first job was to put a second coat of paint on the dinghy and
that job went well. And I have to say if there are any women out there
desperately looking for a man, my advice is to buy an old boat, a row boat
would do, and take it to a boat yard to work on it. Start sanding and
painting and you will get lots of men dropping by to talk. I could hardly
concentrate on painting because men kept coming by to chat. They would
first ask me where the captain was today and the conversations went from
there. One man told me he married a woman just because she said she would
paint the bottom of his boat. She did it, but it was a one paint-job
marriage!
The rest of my afternoon didn’t go as smoothly as the painting. My next job
was to repair a seam on the bimini. This is the canvas cover that serves as
the roof of the cockpit. If Windbird was a convertible car, the dodger
would be the windshield and the bimini would be the remainder of the canvas
top. I got out the SailRite sewing machine which must weigh fifty pounds
and managed to lift it up onto the table. Then I starting trying to figure
out how to use it. Mark does all the sewing for us and this machine is
different from my Singer. I finally got it to work and sewed the seam on
the bimini where the threads had deteriorated in the sun. I was working at
the speed of light and when I finished I realized I had sewn a flap of
material in with the seam that didn’t belong there. I ripped out the seam
and tried again. I didn’t even check my work when I finished. I just
started trying to put it on. This is easier said than done when working
alone. First you have to lift the boom with the mainsail attached to it out
of the boom crutch. My arms just don’t have the strength to raise something
that heavy up over my head, so I had to use the top of my head to help raise
it. Once the boom was out of the crutch which holds it in the center of of
the boat, I could move it to one side and then lift the pieces of the
stainless steel frame. I thought I was doing okay, but when I was almost
done, I saw that I had put the bimini on backwards. So I had to start all
over. The challenges just went on and on and my mid-afternoon it became
clear that I was just not going to get all of the cleaning jobs done that I
had planned. Our anchor chain locker is just going to have to continue to
be coated in Madagascar red clay. Maybe I’ll get that clean next year.
At 5 pm I drove into town to pick Mark up from work and brought him to
Windbird to help me with a couple of jobs I just couldn’t do and to check a
dripping hose connected to one of the new seacocks. Mark’s cold is better,
but by the end of the day he was very losing his voice. I hated that I had
to have him go to the boat before going home for dinner, but thankfully I
did. He checked my sewing job on the bimini and gave me the bad news that I
will have to do it over AGAIN in the morning. If I had checked my work, I
would have clearly seen that I missed one whole section where the threads
are loose and I would have seen that I caught another flap of material in my
seam at one point that just doesn’t belong there. Mark has a chemo
treatment in the morning. I will take him there and then go back to
Windbird to fix the mess I made. I knew there was a reason that Mark does
all the sewing and I think we should keep it that way. He was able to
tighten down the hose clamp and stop the dripping seacock, but unfortunately
three of five of the hose connections to the new seacocks have to be done
over again for various reasons. I had hoped that Mark would not have to
deal with this, but there is no way on earth I can do that work and since we
are leaving Fiddler’s Cove tomorrow, there is no way they could get the work
done. There’s not enough time for them to do the work and it just takes
strength that I simply do not have. Mark shouldn’t be expending that kind of
energy right now, but you do what you have to do.
Tomorrow afternoon I will pick Mark up from hematology center where he gets
his chemo treatments and bring him to the boat. Heather will pick up Sam
and Jonah, and then she and all three boys will meet us at the boat and
motor with us from Fiddler’s Cove to Woods Hole. Jed hopes his work
schedule will allow him to join us as well. It is supposed to be a
beautiful day but with only 5-10 knots of wind. Since we haven’t put on the
headsail or the staysail and we having removed the spikes from the spreaders
that we put there to scare away birds, we will not be sailing anyway. We’ll
get the boat to Woods Hole and before our first sailing expedition of the
summer, we will ask Heather to climb the mast and remove the bird protection
strips for us. I just don’t want Mark climbing the mast right now.
Heather continued working in the garden today and it looks fantastic. We
are eating kale, mesclun greens, arugala, and peas already, and in a few
days we will have our first summer squash. The corn is definitely going to
be knee high by the fourth of July and the tomatoes are flowering. We’ve
planted lots of green beans and carrots, but we will have to wait a bit for
those. But work we’ve done in the garden this spring is definitely paying
off early.
