a little bit every day

We are doing a little bit every day, and almost all the interior is now provisionally clad  in white, affixed with stainless steel screws. About a thousand of them. This gives us an ever better idea of what it will look like when we get a day warm enough to take it all down, glue it in place, then refit the screws with their special washers.

   Eventually the joins and edges will be trimmed with strips of oak. This is a view forward through the galley to the salon beyond.

Interlocking mega-projects

While we have been 6 months away, building the "family resort" on Vancouver Island, invasive bamboo has been taking over the "family home" in Raleigh, NC. John had already cut a lot of it down when I got my first look at the 6 inch high, 2 1/2 inch diameter green tubes spread about our back lawn. It was my very own "Day of the Triffids" horror show! Years ago, when I planted a single shoot for spring vegetables I never gave any thought to what might happen if it went considerable time without mowing. There had been one shoot, then 4 shoots, then 15(small)shoots, never enough for a good meal, garden stakes,  or even a fishing  line, so I forgot about it. Suddenly here is a forest of 40-ft. "bad grass". Reading up online how to get rid of the stuff was not encouraging. After a day of despair we got to it, and hey presto: not impossible after all. Excellent upper body exercise to clean off the side shoots with a machete: a little every day! Don't know what I'll do with it, but it's great stuff!

 A first look at the Black Pearl was pretty discouraging as well! It's hard to remember what we were up to last April, and there sure is a lot more to do than I remembered, beyond the fact that the deck is a foot deep in fallen leaves & they are not even all fallen!

A simple place to begin is to finish cladding the interior with white fibreglass sheeting, so that is this week's effort: not thrilling, but it will look nice. We sat around a while enjoying the space. It will be fun when we get to live aboard again! 

.

Looking over my shoulder at the Black Pearl

Some time about mid November, we will return to this project.

We hoped to have her  back in the water, to live aboard this summer while starting to build our new home. The water and fuel tank I've been writing about  took a lot of extra work and time. That is now clean and clear, but before re-launch there are those other items still to complete.

Building on Vancouver Island will mean spending the summer there whether or not the Pearl is ready. We have been gifted with a friend's 18ft. motor home, so we'll still begin construction in the next few months, only not from the boat .

I'll be documenting that building and move through The Gift Economy since that blog has been about gratitude and abundance, and it is beyond generous that my friends  give us their motor home.

Another of my blogs has been a meditation about the general economy  
The world of investing and business, which I have loved, has been revealed as even more extensively fraudulent than most of us imagined.
It looks like the big changes predicted by Bernard Lietaer (in the book I am translating)  "The Future of Money" are happening fast.

So John & I are off to begin creating a new home, a retirement project of sufficient magnitude to keep us living life, rather than resting. Meanwhile, I am going to be looking at us (and blogging about it) as a test case in the matter of the two coexisting economies- gift and transaction! The Global Abundance Alliance has just done a workshop in San Francisco which introduced me to more powerful ways of engaging with both.

The Black Pearl looks great and will be back in the water next summer.

The new water tank

It's on its way, it fits in the keel, and it is constructed using the green heat gun he's holding here, and the tool John created.

Facing the Music (or the Polypropylene)

The music is that we are unlikely to get this done in time to truck her out to the west coast so we can live aboard for the summer this year. Bummer. We will be back in the fall, and will have the winter here to work on what we don't get done now. I suppose the good bit about that is that it will be less of a press! The bad bit is that living in a motor home will be less romantic than living aboard in the marina. Sigh.

Meanwhile, the setback of the tank rebuilding has generated its own set of interesting projects, one of which is the welding of a polyethylene water tank. After looking at everything he could find on the internet, John has built himself a plastic welding nozzle. Currently he is making cardboard templates with which to cut the irregular sides of the new tank. The polyethylene sheets and "rope" for welding them arrived very promptly.

A path through the forest of set-backs

Oh the mess! The cabin sole (floor) of the main salon is all torn up. John used our GIGANTIC wet and dry vacuum to suck up the last of the diesel fuel and water. The tank spaces are all clean and dry. He drilled a hole in the hull, and 5 gallons flowed out! Then he used his 5- ton "come-along"  to winch out a great slab of railway line that had been part of the ballast, encased in cement. It's a great heavy thing now obstructing the cockpit.

His next step will be to cut a piece out of the side of the keel so as to get at the area where the steel web between water and fuel tanks had been split by the expansion of freezing water: he will be able to access it for re-welding. Then he will pour something in to fill up the newly opened keel space-maybe runny cement, maybe epoxy (of which we do have a lifetime supply)


Our sand-recycling sandblaster turns out not to be the thing for this job, so it is listed on eBay and we are going to buy another one. John tried it out on the rudder, but either the nozzle is wrong or the power of the compressor is not a proper match, and the results were poor. At least our storied compressor starts up and runs beautifully (unless it runs out of fuel, which it did yesterday.) We started to think "Oh no, it really isn't fixed after all that trouble we had with it!" but it was just trying unsuccessfully to run on air, poor thing. It sure is loud.

  When the keel is re-welded, it will be time to sand-blast that newly exposed area as well as the other areas that need re-spraying with molten aluminum. We'll dust the deck gently, and repaint that as well. All of this should happen soon. The aluminum sprayer did work the last time John fired it up, so we hope nothing has fallen apart in the meantime. If we don't get it all done in time to re-launch and live aboard this summer as planned,  we do have a fall-back arrangement in the shape of a motor home generously offered by our  good friend Bernie Littlejohn from Williams Lake. (Thank you, Bernie!)

Meanwhile,  we do work on hopefully.  It never seems like much, but we are gnawing away little by little and day by day on the project, and it sure is fun.

Plastic welding

We've ordered polyethylene sheets and John is adapting his heat gun to be a plastic welder, so as to create a new water tank.
He's drilled a hole in the hull to let our mixture of diesel oil and water drain out, and plans to pull out the sections of rail we put into the bilge on top of the melted lead for ballast. Then he will refill the bilge with concrete and put the new water tank on top.
Our girls always complained that the water on the boat tasted of the fibreglass lining of the original tank, so there will be no more of that.
The diesel leak was extremely small, but he is welding a new plate onto the bottom of that tank as well.

As we wait for the arrival of the polyethylene sheets, we will get on with fitting the interior finishing skin to the salon, head and galley....nevertheless, this new wrinkle does likely mean a later completion date for this project.