Monday, September 1, 2014

Ant Mode

August in the Pacific Northwest is a good time for boating... power boating that is.   Temperatures are warm and there is little wind.  It's a good time for a sailor to take advantage of the weather to get annual maintenance tasks done.  While we have been grasshoppers since spring, Now we must become ants.

I set myself four tasks to complete this fall, before the winter rains begin in earnest.  These are:
  1. Sand and varnish the caprails, eyebrow teak and the handrails.
    This task morphed into something much bigger - while Jane tackled the eyebrow and handrails, I ended up removing the 16-year accumulation of varnish from the starboard caprail, taking it all the way back to bare wood.   Then I dug out all the caulk between the caprail and the bulwark and reapplied new polysulphide.  Currently, the starboard caprail needs one more coat of varnish; the port side is complete.  We plan to re-mask and apply the final starboard coat while at anchor in Blind Bay. Since we have a wedding to attend next weekend, this probably won't happen until the week of Sept 8.
  2. Erect fencing around the young trees on our property.
    This is necessary because the young bucks destroy small trees as a territorial signal to each other.  I laboriously drove fence posts into the rock-hard soil and stretched chicken wire around 8 trees.  Task complete.
  3. Paint the front of our log cabin.
    This is the side facing southwest - the sun does its worst here.  Requiring about a hundred thousand trips up and down a 30' extension ladder, all I have left to do on this is some window trim - about another day's work.
  4. Repair Eolian's cockpit canvas.
    Several zippers need to be replaced due to the sun destroying the plastic teeth.  I had also planned to re-make two of the top Bimini pieces; I have the Sunbrella on hand...  we'll see if I have enough time before the rains start.
Anyway, we've certainly made good use of the August sailing lull.  But I confess that this blog has suffered some as a result. 

And so has my body.






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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ladder work - not my favorite thing to do. Just can't be too careful!

Most folks don't associate varnish work with heroism, but I think it's very heroic. That's a big, fussy job and it's going to look great. Hope you'll share some photos.

Rick

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