Passport's Adventures: Boat Yard

Day 92 of our 30 day stay in the boat yard. So for everyone that thinks we are floating around in tropical waters sipping rum … life is currently a very different story. There’s not a whole lot of fun involved at the moment, unless you consider sanding, varnishing and crawling in small spaces to install a generator fun, then by all means get down here, this is the time of your life you are missing!

The decks took nearly a month, but they are officially done. We hired Flavit and his crew to do the work, they do a good job, are hard workers, always happy and easy to get along with. The big however is that any project really needs to be supervised very closely, and there are quite a few issues that need to be looked out for to avoid problems with the finished result (or time in a redo). Flavit and his crew may not get it just right on the first go around, and they may make some seemingly novice mistakes, but he will do anything you ask to make it right.

Just as we came into the boat yard we had the opportunity to talk with two other cruisers who just had their decks done by Flavit, and were given the pitfalls to avoid, we learned a few more in the process. We were warned to check the tape very closely when they taped off the deck to spray the gel-coat. I did. I re-taped much of it. We were also warned to mix PLENTY of gel-coat, and make sure it was mixed well throughout the process. They ended up with the color changing as they got to the end of the bucket, as it wasn’t mixed thoroughly, and ran out of gel-coat having to remix and repaint the entire deck. The mixing process here is standing over a bucket of gel-coat, with red, yellow, blue and black: mix till you like the color. If you have ever stood over paint chips picking out the perfect not quite white, white, then you know how hard it can be to choose a shade. We wanted a not quite white similar to our hull. So a little red, a little yellow .. mix .. compare to the last sample etc, until you can’t tell what any of them look like. When we finally got a color we were happy with, I certainly didn’t want to repeat that process again. On that go around, we did have plenty of gel-coat and were able to finish the job on one mixing. It would have been nice if it was one spray as well. The spraying went okay, but he chose the windiest day we had out of the month to spray, which blew a lot of dirt into the gel-coat. A bad decision. Spraying should only be done on days with no to little wind, it’s still a dirty place so dirt is an issue, but why not minimize. When they sanded down the gel-coat, they went through all the layers in several places and those had to be taped off again and repainted, it turned out okay, but not as well as if it had been right to start with. Faced with it again, I would insist he spray twice, once the first day and again the day after to assure a good coat everywhere. And then we get to apply to nonskid. The choices here are a very very fine nonskid that he sprays on, and the other is a much larger texture. We went for the larger, which has to be rolled on. Mixing grey was every bit as much fun as mixing white. The first go around, black was added to the white and put on the deck. The next day we looked at the deck, it was grayish with a very strong blue tone. The nonskid was very rough and very sharp. After a while of talking we found out that it would be better if it was sanded a little, this wasn’t just done or offered we had to ask. So it gets sanded we mix up a new color, trying to make sure there was no blue tone to it, we erred on the side of green, but just barely and it looked okay, however there were places that stayed soft and never dried right. When wet there were places that had been sanded too hard and were just plain slick. So once again tape off and re-do the non-skid. This time we forgot to mention ‘get plenty of gel-coat’, apparently it’s a reminder that has to be said every time. The painstaking process of mixing grey, resulted in a very nice grey, no blue, no green, just a nice light grey. We got down the first coat, with new non-skid compound. On the previous applications when rolling the gel-coat, they would put the gel-coat in a tray add a capful of activator, to harden it, mix it around with the roller and apply. I’m sure you can imagine that it was quite easy to get spots of gel-coat on the deck that would contain little to no activator, not harden well and get ground in with dirt. We had them mix in a separate container and pour into the tray, even then they had to be watched closely to make sure they didn’t use any right out of the mixing container. By this point we want to be done with the decks and not have any more mistakes. At the end of day the decks looked great, the color was perfect. Day two would be lightly sanding the non-skid and applying two new coats. But we didn’t have enough mixed gel-coat! We were able to mix a nearly exact match of the grey, but that hour could easily have been spent doing something else if we had enough to start with. The first go around with the nonskid many of the edges where the tap had been were also ground with dirt and didn’t look so good, it may have been the tape residue rubbed into the gel-coat before it set completely, we are not really sure as we didn’t watch them take the tape off the first time. We opted to take the tape off ourselves the second time and mostly not walk on the gel-coat at all for a couple of days to let it fully cure. The tape removal process was very slow and tedious. Some places the gel-coat was quite thick over the tape and hard to break/cut with a knife to peel up the tape. It would have been better if they were more careful in the application near the tape, keeping the edges thinner and barely overlapping the tape. The green tape that is available here will leave a very sticky residue just after a day, if possible the blue tape is much better to use, bring some from the states or another country if you can, I have seen some available in one of the marine stores here in Cartagena. In the end, the decks look great, and Flavit did a great job, we would highly recommend his work to other cruisers.

As with most boat projects it’s not a far leap from one project to lead to yet another project. While we had Flavit working on our decks, we had him do some fiberglass work for us. When we repaired damage from the lightning strike in Grenada we moved some instruments from the cockpit up to a Navpod over the companionway. This was a big improvement, making them much more visible and accessible, but didn’t look the best. Flavit fiberglassed a custom navpanel over our companionway, it looks great and gave us more space to mount cockpit speakers. And since we were into fiberglass…. When we bought the boat she had a deck mounted life raft, which was well out of inspection. Instead of shelling out the money for an inspection that may or may not pass we replaced the life raft with a Winslow that stows below decks. Instead of getting rid of the life raft deck box we used it to store our folding kayaks. This worked well but was not the easiest to get into, so we had a new deck box built, with a hinged lid it’s easy to access, and a little bigger in the same space.

One project leading to another … for the past two years we have had trouble with our windlass blowing breakers, not going up or down at very inopportune times. IB had added a new breaker mucked with wires and other stuff. We were contemplating getting a new windlass when we took the old one off the deck and discovered no main bearing at all, it was completely worn away, and the mount was completely corroded through on one of the three legs. So a new windlass went onto the project list; one of the quicker projects to complete.

I took advantage of not using the dingy and having a room to work in to make a set of dingy chaps to cover the top of the dingy. Saving it from damage due to UV and not so great dingy docks. I even found a bit of Spectra fabric hiding in my fabric supplies, after quite a bit of effort getting it cut I reinforced the front panel with it, nothing is going to abrade through that!

The other sewing project to take advantage of the extra space was replacing the UV cover on the staysil, and repairing a few rips. I got one place repaired, only to find two others harder to reach. I spent a day removing the old UV cover, taking out all the threads and cutting out the new cover. When I started assembling and sewing I had some trouble with the machine jamming and breaking needles. When I saw the amount of area that would need hand sewn because my machine could not stitch through it I gave up and went to a sail repair shop. Using all my supplies, even my thread since it was better quality than what they have available, the cost was $40 USD. That was very much worth letting the repair shop sew it for me.

The interior varnish has just been time consuming. We completely stripped the galley. The varnish had completely worn through in spots, and just didn’t look good. Luckily most of the boat was still in good shape and just got/ is getting a good cleaning, sanding and refresher coats. It seems my life for the past month and a half or more has been; wake up, sand, varnish, repeat. I am finally nearing a point where there is an end in site.

Since we were here, and found a good way to ship items in from the US, thinking of future plans to spend time in the San Blas islands and possibly head into the south pacific, we decided to install an AquaGen (a DC generator and watermaker). The watermaker makes 24 gal/hr, the luxuries of abundant clean fresh water, and no need to worry about the water source. Many times we fill up with water at marinas but don’t really know how safe the water is. IB has been working on the generator install for the past two weeks or so. A space had to first be made for it, by moving the autopilot. Once he got it physically mounted, and we started looking for a place to mount the control panel. The decision ended up with building a box and mounting it over the shelf in the quarter berth, which led to moving the shelf up 6”. Something I had wanted to do for a while, I just didn’t have a good enough reason to make it a priority project for IB. The control panel did the trick! And it’s great news for any guests, since they will now have space under the shelf to actually roll over. I’ll never understand the original reasoning to put that shelf so low over a bed. The generator install sadly will not be finished. We have long overstayed our intended stay and will have more to do when we return from the US in the fall.

I’m quite sure there are smaller simpler projects that got done as well; I just can’t remember what they are right now! And it’s time for me to head out and start sanding.