Day 299, Year 9: Shining Windbird’s Topsides
Date: Saturday, August 16, 2014
Weather: More Sunshine, Warm Day in the High 70’s F, Cool Evening
Location: Staying at Heather and Jed’s, East Falmouth, MA
When your boat has been painted with AwlGrip as Windbird has been, you no longer ‘wax’ the topsides. Instead you put on a polymer coating called AwlCare. The result is the same, however. The topsides look shinier than they did before. And that was our big job of the day. If you are not a boater, you probably don’t know what topsides are. Basically topsides are the sides of your boat. Boats have a bottom and a deck, and everything in between is referred to as topsides. Windbird’s bottom was painted yesterday and once we put the AwlCare on today, she was looking good. Mark did one side of the boat and I did the other. Well, sort of. I could only reach about halfway up on most of my side, so once Mark finished the port side, he came over to starboard and did the top half. Now everything is done up to the rub rail and all we have left if the green sheer stripe above the rub rail and below the toe rail on the deck.
We came home and had a bit of a lazy afternoon. The weather was beautiful, so sometimes Mark sat out on the back deck to read and plan. He is still working on routes from South Carolina to Puerto Rico. When I joined him on the back deck I saw that what I think is a Chinese Flame Tree (Koelreuteria bipinnata) in the backyard is in full bloom. This tree can be a pest as it seeds and grows new little trees everywhere, but as fall approaches, it is stunning. It has little yellow blossoms that form seed pods that look like pinkish-orange Chinese lanterns. The bees were busy this afternoon going from blossom to blossom. I took some photos of the tree and of the garden. It is starting to go from jungle stage to end-of-the-season stage. Tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers are still going strong, but everything else is either going to seed or drying up. That, along with the cool nights, tell us that fall is approaching faster than we’d like to think.
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| 140816 Day 299 Cape Cod, USA–AwlCare for Windbird's Topsides |
