We purchased our little boat (sadly still doesn't have a name) in September of 2008. She came with lots of friends living on her underside. Came close one day to getting her partly cleaned off, but never got her hauled out and cleaned up properly.
That's going to change this week. We've got an appointment with the yard at the end of this week to get her hauled out. We plan on doing bottom painting, fixing a couple small scratches on the hull and deck and maybe a bit of work on the teak. I've never seen her out of the water, so I'm excited to get her out and take a good look.
At the same time, Geoff is hauling out Solana at the same yard so it should be a good time.
An update on the leaky windows: I'm happy to report that the boat has had little to no leaking from the deck this winter. With the newly sealed windows and the tarp installed over the companionway, mostly covering the windows, she's stayed nice and dry inside. Not once have I had to pump the bilge!
Well, it's been a while since I've written here. Since the new year, I've only gone out twice on our little gal. Been busy with work and getting sick earlier this year. But the next big thing coming down the pike is my ocean upcoming ocean crossing with the Jolly Roger! I'm leaving for Puerto Vallarta on April 20 with a one-way ticket. We're set to cast-off on April 23 and make our way to Hilo, Hawai'i.
The high winds and the lung butter along with the need to make money after a great summer of sailing have kept me off the boat so far this fall. A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend while Lo Lo was away resealing the windows on the boat. They had been leaking even wit
h a light overnight drizzle. That would not do with the coming winter with wind and driving rain expected.
It was a perfect September weekend in Seattle. After a couple of false starts, I managed to scrape and reseal the 4 windows over the course of the weekend. It took about 10 hours total - way more than I thought it would take, but I got some sun, had a couple beers, and entertained the local gulls.
The first window I took on was tough. The sealant was pretty new and it took a while to get the window frame pried up and another hour or two of scraping to get it clean. I was able to get the rest of the window frames off with my fingernails (probably why they were not keeping any water out).
I'm not a great caulker but I'm a perfectionist so I'm ultimately not completely happy with the result. We could probably use new window frames altogether and could probably stand to re-bed the screws, but after a couple of rains, I didn't notice any major leaks, so I'll call it a success.
For my next trick... I'm currently looking for a trailer to borrow for our boat so that we can haul it out and do some work in our driveway dock like bottom paint and fixing a couple of hull scratches and gouges.
The wind went nearly dead as I was waiting for Todd and Ben to show up last night, but as we got going around 7pm, it picked up and we had a magnificent, chill sail. Pretty short, but we got to fly the spinnaker and drink a couple beers (rum and coke for the liveaboard). Then I slept on the boat and woke up to rain and seagulls. Not bad.
It seems it's really hard to keep up with a blog in the summer. We've been very busy since moving our boat to Shilshole in the beginning of June. We moved our primary residence in July to Ballard, getting closer to the boat. But that meant packing, unpacking, settling, doing all 8 things that everyone has planned for every weekend day of the summer, plus a little R&R with each other.
It's great having the boat at Shishole. Our slip is in a perfect spot to start conversations. Everyone loves the unique look of the boat and are blown away by the amount of space inside as well as the layout of the cabin. It's nearly impossible to sit on the boat working on little projects without most people walking by to say hi and ask about the boat.
We've gone out a few times, including through the locks into Lake Union once. First time through on my own boat. Luckily we got to go through the small locks so we didn't have to tie up to 250 research or fishing vessels. (That's Emily, the mayor of Duck Dodge, helping me through the locks)
Once in Lake Union, I got a chance to swim around the boat and find that we have enormous mussels growing on the bottom of the boat, ON THE ANTI-FOULING PAINT. Going to need to get her out of the water for a couple of days and scrape and repaint for sure before the weather turns sour.
Also trying to get an overnight going on the boat somewhere before the summer is over (see note about our popularity above).
Well, we made it to Shilshole Marina after a long trip heading into the wind the entire time. The wind let up from its constant 10-15 knots so that we could eat our lunch, but other than that we found ourselves beating the entire day.
We left at noon from Des Moines with the sun high overhead and the wind steady from the N. We not so quickly realized that we weren't able to beat as well as we would have liked and by 4:30, just a few miles past Three Tree Point, we decided to motor for a while. It was a good test of what our little 32 year old motor was capable of. It ran for 2 hours straight with no problems. Seems the issue is when you pull back the throttle after running at high speed for a while. It just dies. Will have to figure that one out as it's kind of important when you need to not hit stuff.
We ended up motoring until about 6:30, at which point we were somewhere in the middle of Elliott Bay. Once we were happy about not being in the way of ferries, we cut the motor and raised the sails to see how much further we could get before sunset. A little before 8 and not really much closer to West Point and the sun setting, we decided to motor the last bit to get into our new slip before it was completely dark. We pulled in around 8:30, tired and happy to be home at O-4.
We fired up the grill and invited some friends over for beer and gardenburgers. We eventually got her cleaned up and on our way out to grab some more beers in Ballard, we ran into our friend Chris who we found out has his boat at N dock (right next door). So now we've got Ben at L-dock and Chris and Tracy at N-dock. This is shaping up to be a great summer.
