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.

The trouble with the water tank

It seems water leaked down into the bilge, froze, and tore the internal keel partition separating the water and fuel tanks. The giveaway was slight bulging visible in the exterior keel....John has seen a few earlier cases of water freezing and splitting steel structures....really a powerful, impressive force of nature. The next step for us is to remove the tank top on the fuel tank, inspect that too, and drain the fuel. In this picture the clean drained water tank can be seen, and aft of it the top of the fuel tank still in place. 

John will drill holes in the keel to evacuate any remaining water and fuel, then refill the deepest sections of the keel with cement, and weld new tank bottoms on both the water and fuel tanks.

Two steps forward, one step back!

Since wrote last, I took a trip to LA, leaving John with his brother George to do some sandblasting and metal spraying. After its original sandblasting, our steel hull  was coated ("flame sprayed") with aluminum. This worked brilliantly until the day we gave her over-barnacled, in need of a bottom clean- to a shipyard unfamiliar with the process. They went at the barnacles  exuberantly, blasting back down to the bare steel before repainting, in spite of John's pleas for a light hand. Now, many years later, the only patches on the hull which show rust are the ones where the flame-sprayed aluminum coat was removed. So John & George hoped to sandblast those spots and  fire up our very own, historic Metco metal sprayer for a coating with the rolls of aluminum wire we have on hand.

They pulled out the compressor and  fired it up. (We drove down to buy it from an ex-biker dude in Florida two years ago-a  story I'll get back to. It sits on its own trailer, the easiest trailer I have ever towed!)

Then John and George pulled out our second-hand 1969 military-issue recirculating sand-blaster. We've never used it, but it looked like it would be a good thing. Its appeal lies in that  recirculating the sand. When we originally had the hull sandblasted in our backyard in downtown Ottawa, the sandblasting caused such a huge cloud that we had a visit from the department of the environment (just after we had a visit from the police because of the noise.) But it turns out not to work very well. It's theoretically a simple device, but for the moment that whole part of the project is on the back burner.

They decided to do some interior finishing,  work that would show some progress  when I got back. They didn't want me to think that while I was away they had ONLY spent their time eating fine meals and drink great beer. So we have had great visible progress on the look of the interior.

We have been finishing off a whole series of little cosmetic items, and decided yesterday to lift up the floors in the main salon to reassure ourselves of the state of the water and fuel tanks before installing the final plumbing.
As the lid came off the water tank, John said, "Why is it pink?" and I said, "Why does it smell like kerosene?"

Thirty-two years ago

While we work on day by day, getting the Black Pearl ready for re-launch, it is fun to look at old photos. This shot from inside the growing hull, taken in 1979 or thereabouts, shows John doing the original welding of interior frames.

Twenty years ago....

Here we were, sailing on the Neuse esturary

The lathe is fixed

It only took John a day to repair his lathe! What a hero! He just took it apart peacefully, and put it back together again happily, and no more clunka-clunka.

We have been back at work putting an interior plywood cladding all over, trying to make noticeable  progress before Uncle George arrives on Valentine's Day to lend his support. I've blown the USB port on my computer, so I now need a different approach to uploading my pictures of all this progress, but any day now!

Having a gear loose

I took this picture this morning, and it looks like progress to me: almost a place to live aboard! But as usual, unexpected impediments to progress arise. We were planning to put plywood cladding on to-day. Last night John set to work  to machine a thread on a piece of pipe for extending the sink drain. Suddenly there was a loud noise: cruncha cruncha! 

It could be the end of the lathe he bought second-hand from Otto Bruder's machine shop in Ottawa in 1974. It has lasted almost as long as our family's mythical toaster. Today he is investigating  whether or not the cruncha cruncha was terminal: so far he has found a loose gear

The horror of epoxy, and "small" problems

We have started to install a lovely white ceramic sink in the head (bathroom for you shore-birds), and along with that more of the interior cladding. There is also a shower drain pump almost ready. We are working up to the great moment when our composting toilet will come to rest in the waiting space. In every case some "small"  impediment  arises  to prevent completing the job.

The sink came with a perfect 4" drain pipe, which alas is just an inch too short for this installation. The diameter is non-standard, and so is the material.Can't be glued, doesn't fit standard pipes. Therefore an exercise in creativity and out of the box thinking will be necessary to modify it.

The drain pump fouls a neighboring structure by 1/8": that too calls for slight modification of the angles of pipe. Have to remove the whole drain to get at it.

The fan ( composting toilet smells, for the exhausting of) fits beautifully into the housing John began and I blogged about on January 4th. Meanwhile, our son Chris confronted us with the unhealthiness of fiber glass fumes (liver toxic, as I should well know)  Daughter Liz, who is also a doctor, reinforced the message. Fiber glass work calls for outdoor ventilation.

Weather  not permitting,,  John created the second part  with epoxy. It turns out  epoxy is a much less satisfactory medium- not toxic, but very unforgiving to the sculptor. Eventually the whole thing came together literally-one half inserts into the other. It took twenty-seven days to complete what looks like a  very small bit of the refit!

I remember back in the days when we lived aboard the original "Black Pearl" , we painted the topsides with an epoxy paint. It was one of my very least favorite experiences of all time. Sticky, sticky, sticks to the fingers, sticks to the shirt, sticks the fingers to the shirt. It also stuck every passing small insect to the paint job, thus demonstrating why boatyards have these giant indoor places for professionally painting yachts. 

Boat yoga

We had a spell of cold weather, and were just not up to the job for a while. But the temperature has risen, so the workers are back in action. Everything seems to take five times longer than I imagine. It is wonderful meditation practice.

To-day we were fitting an eighty inch length of quarter inch plywood  against one wall of the head. It took five goes before the thing would fit, and every step of the way involves the kind of personal contortion not customary to people in their mid-sixties.

John has altered the floor of our main cabin. He has made a flat section, where we used to slide. For me, this is an unmitigated improvement. For John, not quite: because he is 6'2" where I am 5'3", he is now at risk of hitting his head. I think I will put a whimsical cushion on the ceiling ...it may look unusual, but I may prevent head injury! 

A little of this, a bit of that..

These new LED lights in the main salon WORK!

A lot of "small" jobs are underway: if we get the wiring done, we can finish the interior decorative cladding. The exhaust piping is lined up and tack welded, the parallel head exhaust is shaping up, wiring is ready for the new battery system (3 small batteries instead of the giant back-breaking truck battery). I am finding all the little places that never got insulated, and insulating them. There are bits lined up for the shower pump-out system, the refrigerator, and the sink in the head.

The interior will be much brighter interior than the original "Black Pearl", with  white cladding and light wood trim. I have made sofa cushions of brown leather, and mattresses of mixed quilted upholstery fabric.
There is a great photo of John hanging upside down in the bilge: I call it "boat yoga"! But it is a little dark, and anyway this one is a better illustration of the real joy of a good big project for enlivening  retirement years!   

After the holiday pause

To-day we went aboard for the first time in almost a month, and made a list of the things to do so that Jenny sees progress when she gets back from Rome in the middle of January. She and Esteban got engaged over the holiday, and his dad and sister came from Ecuador to celebrate with us. We had what my mother used to call "a whee of a time". And it does look like a lot that needs doing if we are going into the water at the end of March!

So here is to-day's creation- there is a wooden form (created on the lathe this afternoon) coated with a kind of wax that is intended to permit the fibreglass applied on top of the form to release after it hardens. It hasn't hardenned yet, and it is SO SMELLY. If it works, it will be a housing into which the fan required for our composting toilet will fit. If it hardens.
The other accomplishment of the day is a LIST of all the things there are to do! A long list.