All day, every day, working on the boat…

That isn’t literally true of course. We don’t work on the boat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It just feels that way sometimes.

We have been told that people follow along with us on this blog to see how our cruising life is working out. I hope they aren’t too disappointed. So far our “cruising life” has come is short spurts. Between those limited months of moving, exploring, and getting to know many new faces, have been far more months of sitting and working. For the first couple of years the sitting and working always involved family boats. Even before dropping the dock lines to go cruising we had to deal with the initial problems with the V-drive / transmission failure. When the jobs went away and we decided to call it quits on the “American way of life” there were more months of work. Even before Kintala went on the truck for the trip east; the wind vane install and a repair on the bottom faring chewed through many weeks of near constant labor.

Once in Oak Harbor we thought we were close, but then came the labor needed to get Ye Old Tartan in big water without taking on said water. Labor that included hauling the boat out of the water, dropping the rudder, and taking on a pretty ugly fiberglass repair in the tiny space under the cockpit. We threw in a rudder repair while at it, just because it seemed like a good time to fix a rudder that was split all the way across its bottom.

Our first trip south saw us holed in Oriental for a few weeks struggling with the failing fuel injection pump. We got some cruising in after that, including our first trip to the Islands with our friend John.

The summer working on the Bear came next. Months went by, working through the Florida heat. Little did I know that was a precursor of life soon to be. We did make it back to the Chesapeake, where Kintala went up on the hard and, yes, we spent many a week working on her once again. It was good work, bottom paint and some interior changes that made living on her much, much more comfortable. But it was still seemingly endless days of gazing out at the anchorage wondering when we would find our way out there again.

We did, eventually, making it to the Islands for many glorious weeks. But that cruise was followed by the first stint of being a professional boat mechanic. It was good experience, and helped revive a nearly exhausted cruising kitty. Plan all you like for “retirement,” but don’t bet on it working out that way. Issues can and will pop up, and one is left to deal with them as best as possible.

We got another stint good of cruising in after that, visiting our beloved Abaco Islands and, this time, sailing all the way around them and back to the States. Then it was back around the Keys for a second season of fixing other people’s boats. That season ended a couple of weeks ago but we are far from being on our way again. I suspect it will be at least another month before we can sail off, and I will not be surprised if that estimate proves too optimistic.

Cruising, at least in our case, is just doing the best you can to get by while living on a boat. In some ways it is a lot easier than living on land simply because it is far easier to “get by” when one isn’t burdened with cars, houses, insurances, and an endless array of “stuff” rarely used but still taking up space.  But boats are labor intensive devices. The older they get the more labor intensive they become. As a life long mechanic and tinkerer my way of making peace with that reality has been to regard Kintala as a hobby as much as she is a home. So what if it takes a few more weeks to make the teak pretty and the bottom smooth? Why fret over changing pumps and plumbing, adding accumulators and inverters if, in the long run, it makes our daily living a bit more enjoyable? I spent endless hours tweaking the GXSR, working on projects out in the shop, keeping little airplanes flying, and working on houses. It helps to think of boat work as more of the same.

If our history is to repeat itself we will get “out there” again before too long. It may take a bit of effort to scrape the rust off of our sailing skills, rust acquired after months of sitting in one place. The good news is we have all of Tampa Bay to warm up in, and can take all the time we like. Until then it is...

All day, every day, working on the boat.

Anchorage Sim

Kintala is out of the water once again, this time for a real bottom job. What looked to be about eight layers of old paint was sanded off down to the gel coat. There are some minor blemishes and a nick or two that need attention. Three barrier coats will go on, followed by a couple of coats of bottom paint. Given that the boat is some 35 years old, we are pretty happy with what we have found. This is the perfect place to get such work done. People I have worked with for nearly two years are attending to our hull. Friends. People I trust. People who make a living doing exactly this kind of work.

Other projects are underway as as well. Our little Merc outboard, a unit that has never been my favorite, came a bit of a cropper. The shift lever locked up in its housing leading to the wimpy plastic handle shedding its insides, stripping itself bare of any grip. We pulled the power unit off to gain access to the shift mechanism thus verifying that the interconnecting rod was frozen solid in the housing. Torque supplied by my largest pair of vice grips simply sheared the shaft, even after heating, liberal applications of penetrating oil, and light tapping with a ball peen hammer.

Fortunately, the shaft is aluminum so drilling it out only cost one broken bit. Still, with most of the core gone, what was left of the shaft still refused to budge. By then the sun was setting and it was time to call it a day. The next morning had us moving Kintala into the lifting well so we didn’t get back to the Merc until later in the afternoon. Maybe it was the chilly temperatures reached overnight. Maybe it was being soaked in penetrating oil. Whatever the cause, a punch and some gentle persuasion caused the trashed out bit of shaft to actually move a little. Persuasion of a less gentle nature was applied, and the trashed out bit moved a bit more. Yeah! A few more taps and we were home, the part free and, even better, the housing itself undamaged.

It is better to be lucky than good.

Primer coat curing

The new parts arrived and were installed. Added to the $100+ worth of fuel parts Deb installed earlier, the miserable little Merc should be about as good as it is going to get. Which isn't to say I expect it start on the first pull. My guess is it will take a few hours of nursing, cursing, and cleaning to get it chugging away once again. We are also doing all the bright work on the boat, a task that is at least a full year overdue. The good folks here at the yard have agreed to let us sit in the stands to put the finish on the toe rail.  Scaffolding is a lot easier and quicker to work from, easier than trying to wield a finishing brush while in the Ding. Sitting up here we also discovered an elusive fresh water system leak that has been lurking around the boat for a good while. It turned out the pump itself would drool water depending on just where the shaft stopped spinning. A new, and much (much) quieter pump was installed. An accumulator was added to the system as well, something we should have done long ago. (One could barely talk over the noise the old pump would make while running.)

Though it is all good stuff and Kintala will be in the best shape of her life when splashed, it feels like we are going backwards. Indeed, sitting on the hard, the boat in the usual state of disrepair that comes with sitting on the keel, the "to do" list far from being completed? Escaping the shore looks further away, not closer.

One nice thing is that being on the hard, at least around here, comes with a really excellent view. In the slip most of what we see are other boats really, really close, a wall, and a bit of water off the stern. On the hard we have an elevated view of the Manatee River all the way to Tampa Bay and out to the horizon. Sitting in the cockpit on a cool morning, sipping coffee?  It feels pretty good after nearly a year of working in the boat yard.

We are still working pretty hard, but at least we can pretend the scene is near that of riding to the anchor.

It helps.

Hydrocoat 2-year update

If you haven't already seen it, the Hydrocoat 2-year update is now up on the Hydrocoat tab.

Hydrocoat Review

Hydrocoat Update

There's an update on the Hydrocoat review on the tab in the bar above if you're looking for bottom paint.

Random thoughts on a half day

Deb and I finished up the bottom paint around 12:30. Instead of taking on another project in the heat of the day we decided to give ourselves a bit of a break, grab some lunch, head into a nearby town for some ice cream, maybe even take in a movie. I haven't been off-site in more than a week. For an ex-airplane driver used to wandering around the country that is like being house bound. On my half day of leisure some thoughts come to mind ...

Hydrocoat "RED" isn't really red, it is more like a sandstone pink. And "BLACK" isn't really black, it's more like a dark chocolate brown. It looks okay, but not quite like I expected. The nearly three weeks of constant effort to get the bottom done seems like a lot. If pressed I might admit that Kintala is slightly more seaworthy than she was; after all the concrete void is now sealed. Supposedly the Chesapeake Bay water critters will find a poor purchase on the not-so-shiny new paint as well. Add that to the fact that the boat does look a far sight more "nautical" than she did - maybe the three weeks of effort were worth it after all. One thing is for sure; her good looking bottom makes the various dock scuffs on her flanks look much worse than they are. My operator's head tells me don't worry about it, there are surely more scuffs in our near future. My mechanic's heart says its time to break out the polish.

Putting paint on with a roller is a really cheesy way to do it. It doesn't seem too bad if one thinks of a boat as a house which, in a way, it is. But if one tends to think of a boat as a machine, like a car or an airplane or a motorcycle, then rolling on the paint definitely falls into a category of maintenance usually associated with trailer parks. There is probably no cost effective alternative. But I can't help but think that doing a better job of prepping and painting boat bottoms, using just some of the technology available with process and product, would eliminate all of the heartburn over "osmotic blistering". It isn't the fiberglass in the hulls, it isn't the water filled environment, it is just the low rent way we paint them causing the problems.

Kintala probably lost 0.1% of the speed she might have gained to the kamikaze bug corpses now embedded in her new paint. Some of them dove right into the leading edge of the roller which, I thought, was kind of rude. Most of them were corps bugs though, and so smashed into minute little specks that all but disappeared. (The spiders were another story.)

There is still a lot of stuff to do; prop, anchor locker, new anchor, wind vane, pull down the canvas, rig the boat - inside and out - for road travel, get the mast welded, sheaves, LEDs, SSB, VHF antenna, rigging repair and inspection. Then, someday, the boat will go back in the water and a bunch of this stuff has to get done the other way around.

I'm sure glad to be done for today though ... necesita el descanso.

Early mornings, late nights, and lots of progress

A short picture collection from today.

We moved the stand pads and finished the red coat.

After the red coat cured for a few hours we did the black coat. After it sits all night we'll move the stand pads and paint under them as well. The coverage of the black over the red was phenomenal. It continues to impress us.

I think she's looking pretty good, don't you?

Late nights...

Our dinner view from the clubhouse.

I loves me some Hydrocoat

I think I've mentioned this in a previous post, but I ran a Sherwin Williams aircraft paint distributorship

for 5 years back in the early 2000s. We sold a water-based paint, or rather we tried to sell a water-based paint because aircraft painters are a stuck-in-the-mud lot and are petrified to try anything new for fear it will upset the paint fairies and leave them with blushes or blisters and a corporate jet repaint bill of $250K. In addition, after painting with 2-part polyurethanes for decades, they found it impossible to believe that any water-based paint could stick as well as their urethanes or look as pretty. It became necessary for me to send out samples to painters just so they could try it.  I began to get phone calls with the words, "Damn! Don't get this stuff anywhere you don't want it, because it sticks so good you can't get it off!".  So when I found out that Pettit made a water-based paint, one I could used without fear of getting a tumor or turning into a deranged blithering idiot from exposure, I was immediately on board. Today we put on the first coat and I became an instant believer.

The instructions are detailed and clearly written and stress the fact that all bottom paint performance is dependent on the substrate prep, so pay attention to yours if you choose to use it. That being said, it's one of the few paints that can go directly over VC-17, which some previous owner had chosen to put between two layers of other paint of questionable compatibility, a fact that I'm fairly sure contributed to the large amount of paint blisters we had. Hydrocoat can be applied by sprayer, roller or brush and we chose the roller method, not having the facilities to spray and not having the time to brush. The paint rolled on smoothly and dried quickly on our warm day (84° and 68% humidity), but not the irritatingly fast dry of VC-17 which means that two people can share a tray and work at the same time without having to do the antics of VC-17 application to prevent it drying
before you get it on the bottom in the typical Midwest summer heat. There is very little odor, and what there is has a pleasant, clean smell. Need to scratch your nose? No problem. Just rinse your hands under the hose and the paint washes off.  Our blue tape line on the waterline pulled clean and sharp, although we didn't leave it on very long per some forum suggestion I had picked up along the way of researching the product.



We only have the first coat on and we'll update you once we get the black final coat on, but everything I see so far has me smiling big.

Yes, we were working around Tim's fiberglass repair which was still curing

 

Sand ...

There is sand falling out of what looks like a hole in the bottom of my boat. Sand? This cannot be a good thing.

I should have left well enough alone. The area around the keel joint had been ground out and sanded back to solid fiberglass; but the the bottom edge of that fiberglass was loose and there still appeared to be a minute trace of moisture. The mechanic in me was curious as to the origin of said moisture, so the rotary file went to tracing a track up from the loose edge. Just a couple of inches above the keel joint it plunged through into a void and thus appeared the flow of sand.

"This," I thought out loud, "cannot be a good thing."

Replacing the rotary file with a cutting disk I very carefully cut a square of very solid fiberglass aft, paralleling the keel joint. More sand flowed which was clearly a component of a block of material that filled the void between the flat top of the lead keel and the curve of the fiberglass hull; a void that was enclosed behind a skirt of fiberglass flared off the hull and overlapping the top of the keel. Mystery ... the top end of the block block felt like concrete. Could the sand really be deteriorating concrete? The chunk looked like concrete. When hit with a grinding disc it produced a small dust like cloud that smelled like concrete. There is certainly a lot of sand in concrete.

Concrete, in my Tartan?

An assembly of sailors gathered around the boat to gaze at the mystery. As they did I had already decided
two things. Number one was, as bad as this appeared at first, we were once again looking at a cosmetic repair. The keel bolts were fast, the hull unblemished and unbreached, and the keel still a solid block of lead holding up a boat. Number two was that this really was concrete, albeit cheap concete; more like the capping stuff put on the top of foundation wall (basically a mixture of limestone and sand). The assembled agreed though there was some debate as to the proper stuff to use to fill the void to facilitate the fiberglass repair. Some optioned a quick set concrete filler, others fiberglass mat. I've decided that West Marine epoxy filler will be the choice, a choice supported by an Internet friend to whom Deb sent some pictures, a friend who just happens to be an ex-aircraft mechanic and who is currently resupplying the cruising kitty by running a boat repair facility. (It is good to have friends in high places!)

So, though I added another day of work I didn't need to by opening up the void to see what the what, at least I know what the what is. Concrete ... apparently Tartan decided to fill this below-the-waterline void with something cheap and heavy. I wouldn't have thought the words "concrete" and a "Tartan" would go in the same sentence; but nothing in the marine industry surprises me anymore. My "higher end" boat builder poured a water soluble sand mix into a void below the water line. The void got breached, moisture oozed in, some of the limestone slowly melted away, and sand fell out the hole.

Fix it, fair it, clean it, paint it, throw it in the water. With just a bit of luck we will start putting color on the bottom tomorrow. Seeing Kintala with a clean, painted hull will go a long way to have me thinking we are actually pulling this off. Right now I'm just tired and sore, looking at another day of work and wondering when the "throw it in the water" day will arrive.

Un hombre cansado

Kintala came out of the water 20 days ago. It doesn't seem possible it has been that long, right up to putting my foot on the ladder and hauling my tired bones aboard at the end of the day. Then it seems like it has been twice that many. I'm not sure we have faced a crush of work like this one since moving to St. Louis. I'm told that's part of the price one pays for the privilege of making a home of a boat and living on the water.

Stripping the mast turned up two problems. The lower starboard spreader bracket is badly cracked and one of the running back stays has a broken strand. The welder is due later next week for the one, the other we will have to replace once we make the East coast. Neither seems much of an issue at the moment but I am going to be very careful with the rigging as it goes back up. I think the spreader bracket broke because a mount pin was too long, which allowed a bushing to drop free, making room for the pin to twist under a load from the spreader; a load high enough to crack the bracket. Not a big deal on Lake Carlyle; maybe a huge deal half way to far away. All the rigging is now neatly packed on a pallet and ready for the truck.

Work on the bottom paint slowed because, for reasons lost in the distant past, Kintala has a heavy coat
of VC17 on the aft half of the port hull. That stuff proved too much for our pair of little palm sanders and probably sent the older one whining into oblivion. So I am bringing a 5 inch orbital sander into the arena tomorrow. (By the way Warrior sandpaper SUCKS LEMONS. Get 3M or Gator paper with the heavy sticky backing paper ... you'll be glad you did!)

We did finish one project; that of changing the V-berth hanging locker into a shelved clothing cabinet. I'm not living out of a sea bag any longer, making Kintala feel just that much more like home. Odd how little things like that matter, but they do.


We have befriended (or been befriended by) our first cruising couple outside of the Internet. Nancy and David departed this very marina nearly 2 years ago in their Seaward 32 and now base their coastal cruising life at a marina in the Chesapeake. It just so happened that they are back in IL for some personal business and staying with the marina manager just as we started this last phase of The Retirement Project. We have shared several meals and spent evenings plying them with every kind of beginner question we can imagine. They, in return, have been everything one would think "cruising friends" can be. Indeed, so highly do they speak of their home base that Deb and I are probably going to have Kintala shipped there for splashing. It might even be that David and Nancy will be back to their boat by then and around for the big day. Amazing how things work out sometimes. Just having them around has made this whole thing seem just that little bit less insane. They have passed this way before and assure us we are not lost.

And so I am still un hombre contento ... with the hope that the work load eases when Kintala is floating once again. Then I can be un hombre que toma una siesta.

View from the clubhouse at Tradewinds Marina where we're staying.

Seems like every marina has their forlorn, forgotten hulls.

Un hombre contento

With the exception of the surveyor, everyone who looks at Kintala's hull agrees; sand it, clean it, paint it, throw it in the water. That work is well underway and should be done by next week. (There is a lot of sanding, cleaning, and painting to do!) The mast lift was a thing of beauty and all 60+ feet of aluminum and rigging now lies content on saw horses awaiting disassembly. We did find one spreader bracket badly cracked and will try to get that welded before we go. If not, I'm sure the East coast marina can get it done when we get there. The prop will come off in a couple of hours to get overhauled. Most importantly Deb has made the move from the city to the boat and we are working side by side on her list of projects. (Remember, I threw my list away!)

I am a happy man.

At least 15 more days will pass before the truck arrives; my best guess is that finishing the bottom will take another 5. In descending order, and in various places, sanding the bottom is leaving exposed; light blue top coat, darker blue top coat, some grey something, a layer of what everyone claims is VC-17 (that is the brown layer) bondo, epoxy filler, gel coat, and fiberglass; the smoothed patchwork of color a vast improvement over what it looked like in the lift. Of course grinding away the obnoxious smile to a perfectly sound keel joint helped a lot. It is probably a bit insane to work this hard at what is mostly cosmetics. The only real repair is fairing in the keel joint. Other than that we could give the hull a once over with some scotchbright, roll on a couple of layers of magic antifouling paint, toss it in the water. The hull will be just as sound when we pull it in a year or two as it will be with all this work. But it is my boat. I can go a bit crazy making the bottom pretty if I want to.

There actually turned out to be a blister or two. Poking at them released a trace of moisture not even amounting to a drop. The pointy end struck hard maybe 2 mm deep. I’m not convinced the water wasn’t trapped between paint layers but I’ll give the surveyor the benefit of the doubt. And actually (hold tight, I’m going to try and be nice here) admit he might have had the barest hint of a point. I don’t know what the shop rates are at marinas, but if they are just half of what we paid for ye ‘ol jet; Kintala is going to leave Carlyle with a bottom job that would have cost way north of 5 grand in labor alone. I’ll admit, if I had to write a check that big for a couple of layers of bottom paint on a 42 foot boat, it would be an issue.

But the mast is down, work progresses, Deb is here, and even the weather is helping. This has been the coolest, most pleasant midwest summer any of us can remember. Just the thought of trying to do this in the blast furnace of last year could give a person the vapors.

I am a happy man.