|
Home Port Our Logs The Crew Calendar Favorite Links The Boat Photo Album Route and Charts Miscellaneous Stuff |
Larry's LogTuesday was a busy day in the morning - after I finished the weather on the net, we went to a doctor, for me this time, but didn't wait long at all and so we then went to Plaza Mayor and ran some errands. We checked on the Internet for flights to NY since Diane was seriously considering going back for a visit and then we went grocery shopping. We got back at the boat just after lunch and saw Elias just after he had just fixed 2 parts of the varnish inside the boat that got scratched already. He went back to the room to continue varnishing the doors and I went over to show him how to use a heat gun. He was going to strip and varnish some doors that Tom and Steph had given him for their boat. The doors were in good shape but needed to be refinished. I emphasized that the heat gun was very powerful and he needed to be careful when using it. Diane and I just relaxed the rest of the day and I did some emails that I had been meaning to do for a few days. The next day was a busy one again with me removing the remainder of the locker doors inside the boat. Elias had finished the ones we gave him and so needed the rest. After bringing them to him, I found out how much it would cost to chrome plate the door hinges. Some of them were pretty corroded (plain steel under a thin brass plating) and instead of trying to clean and polish 90 hinges, I hoped chrome plating them would be an option but the guy who does it said it would be about $3 per hinge, so the price was much too high. Diane and Steph had gone to Plaza Mayor and so I walked over to CMO to eat lunch with Tom. I showed him the hinges and he said if we could find a polishing wheel, if wouldn't be too bad. I could do them all with the Dremel tool but with that many to do it would take days. Diane and Steph came back to CMO and I went back to Destiny after Diane dropped off Steph. Of course, they took Clem (their beagle) for a dinghy ride first. She likes the ride and their dinghy wasn't launched, so when we go over, we sometimes give Clem a ride. After we got back from Mima, we got ready to go to the Maremares weekly cocktail party. We had a nice time but it started to rain pretty hard about 30 minutes after the party started so we moved it under some cover. Since we were out of the rain, the party just continued and afterward, we stopped at White Tiger for just a while and visited with Denny and Anita. We finally got back to Destiny around 9. The next morning Diane made the decision to go home for a visit so we needed to get more money changed, and after some initial confusion, we got what we needed. She had to go to get the ticket today so her reservation would be held and so she made several phone calls in the morning while I did some things around the boat. Elias has started the other doors and I would need to get the completed doors out of the room to make some room to work. I planned to have him do the companionway steps and the rest of those pieces once Diane left since I could get in and out of the boat using the engine to step on. It was much harder for Diane. The morning just flew by and after lunch, Diane went into town to get her plane ticket, stopped at Emma, the seamstress we used to make the settee slipcovers, to drop off the cockpit seat and fabric for the additional covers we wanted done, and shopped for some souvenirs she wanted to bring back as gifts. I went to drop off more laundry and visit with Mima. We owed them some money that Diane had borrowed the day before. They were going out to lunch and do a little shopping but I figured they would be back around 3:30. So after finishing some small chores, I went over to CMO, dropped off the laundry, and waited for Tom and Steph to come back. I only waited about 20 minutes and they came back, saying they had seen Diane downtown. She had trouble getting a taxi and had taken the bus and was walking very quickly trying to get her errands done. I visited with them for about an hour, discussing a project they wanted to do (of course, I suggested another) and then went back to Destiny. I got back just as Diane came back. We had a drink and around 5:30 Elias came by to drop off the room key and we invited him in for a drink. He's a very nice guy and we just talked for a while, and although he doesn't speak much English, we managed fine. Once Diane made the decision to visit NY, the next day, Friday, was very busy with Diane getting ready to leave on Monday. In the morning, I did some small chores like flush the watermaker and clean off the awning (from the bird crap) while Diane went back to Plaza Mayor to do some shopping and make a phone call to her parents. I also got out some stuff for her to take back, like clothes we didn't wear anymore and the underwater camera that now seems to be working. She'll try to get it fixed, cleaned and get a new lithium battery. Once she got back and we ate lunch, she just relaxed while I worked on the PC a bit. We went to get the laundry at CMO and then visited with Tom and Steph for a while before going back to the boat, just before some very impressive thunderstorms. Saturday, after I did the weather, we continued to get everything ready for Diane's trip back to the States. While she went shopping, I got everything we wanted to send back and also got out the bags and such. It took all day. Since we were basically ready for her trip, Sunday we just did some last minute things and relaxed. People came over to drop off mail they asked us to send off from the States and Steph came by to give us a small package to mail. We were bringing a lot of stuff back for ourselves and some small things for some others, like a dryer vent (used for an air conditioner), yeast, a specific hand moisturizer, sandals, and a fuel line for a radio control helicopter. Quite a varied list - I told Diane to just bring back what she felt she could carry without problems. Diane and I woke up early the next morning and I helped take her bags out to the taxi at 6am. The flight was at 8 but if there were traffic, there might be problems. However, I heard the taxi driver that took her on the radio later during the net so I assumed that she got there OK and in plenty of time. Tom and I went to a lumber store around 9, and since Elias hadn't arrived yet, I left a note and left him his usual insulated bag with water, soda and a glass, as well as the room key. Tom picked up some plywood and Formica for a project he was doing and I got a plank to fasten to the stanchions to hold the jerry jugs. Tom and I got back around noon and he went to Mima and I went to Destiny. I saw Elias and told him I wanted to have him start the companionway steps today since I could get in and out of the boat with just some difficulty - for Diane it was much more difficult. After lunch, he came to the boat and I handed him the steps and other pieces that made up the entranceway. I would now have to step on the engine to get in or out. In the afternoon, I did an experiment with one hinge and some Muriatic acid that Denny, from White Tiger, had lent me. It was pretty strong and after diluting it a bit, I dipped the hinge in and it started to bubble the rust and corrosion away. I didn't want to do too much or risk eating away the steel too much. As I was rinsing the hinge off on the dock, George walked over and said that the guy who does the chrome plating had a change of heart and would do the hinges for $1 apiece, a 66% discount from the first price he quoted. I still wanted to see if they would polish up well and Denny was going to let me use his polishing wheel, so I told George that I would let him know. After that, I just relaxed for a bit until Denny came by to drop off the polishing wheel and after we had a beer together, I went off to Mima for dinner. Dinner was a southern (Texan) dish, chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and corn on the cob. It was excellent and we had a very nice time visiting. The next day I felt I'm finally getting some things accomplished. This morning I went over to the place where I had some other stainless work done and asked him to make 3 replacement tops for the stove burners. He said ok but wanted to keep the sample top as well as the stove lid. The burner tops wouldn't be ready for 2 days so I would be without a stove until then. Good thing Diane isn't here right now since she would not allow me to leave everything, but I didn't care so much. Back at the boat, I started using the buffing pad and compound that Denny had lent me to try to polish the door hinges. I picked out the ones I felt were OK and started. The really corroded ones I left for later and possibly would paint those. The hinges that were OK did polish well except that using the metal polish I had actually worked better. The problem was that it was a lot of manual work to use it since it required hand rubbing with a cloth. So I kept trying the drill and tried a sequence, like using the drill first, then the Dremel tool and finally the paste polish. It would work but was very time consuming. Each hinge, to do all the surfaces, took about 15 minutes and I had about 90 hinges. After working on it for about 2 hours, and only finishing 4, I left it alone. Tom called after lunch and asked if I wanted to go to EPA, a store like Home Depot. I said sure since I wanted to get some paint to see if the corroded hinges would paint well. I went to their boat by dinghy and we got a taxi to the store. I got my paint and Tom got his stuff and then we walked to some other stores near there with hose, various tools and another marine store I had never been to before. We finally got back to Mima around 4:30 and after we had a beer at the restaurant, I went back to Destiny, took a shower and went back to Mima for dinner - they were nice enough to invite me again. After all, I'm just a poor misguided bachelor for the next 2 weeks, and now without even a stove to boil water. Wednesday, after I got the weather information to give over the net, I decided to make some biscuits! Well, Diane already had the biscuit mix made, all I had to do was measure it and add milk. But I did that OK and they were fine. I had also made coffee by suspending the teapot over the burner by a string held by the port light over the stove. Steph and Tom had invited me to go to lunch in PLC with them so I just did some things around the boat and then took the dinghy over to CMO. I met them and we went to an Arabic restaurant where we had chwarmas, like a Greek gyro - very good. After that, we went to have some ice cream. We then went to the Auto-Boat Center, the chandlery Tom and I had been to yesterday so they could get some pieces to repair their air conditioner hose. They had bought the hose, but it was the wrong size, so they now needed to get some hose adaptors and other fittings. I bought some spares for the dinghy and we got back to CMO at around 3:30. We had a drink at the bar and I then went back to Destiny, just missing a tremendous thunderstorm. I started taking the stuff out of the navigation station since I asked Elias to start that next. I took down the headliners so he could get at the bulkheads completely. It was a lot of work to remove everything but I think the end result will be worth it. The next day, after doing the weather, I changed some money again and started work on the aluminum toerails. I had inspected them and marked all the corrosion spots yesterday with blue tape so I figured today I could try to do one side. There were pits and holes in spots that needed to be addressed before the whole thing started to corrode. After Elias came and got started, I got out the Dremel tool, took the dinghy down and started to go over the spots I had marked yesterday, starting on the port side. The pits had to be enlarged and cleaned of all corrosion before the epoxy would adhere well so I did that, cleaned the area with alcohol and taped them off. After finishing the prep work, it was time for lunch but I never did get to eat. I started taking some more things off the nav station so Elias could start the preparations for varnishing. After I finished that, since it looked like it would rain at some point in the afternoon, I started mixing the epoxy and applied it to the prepared spots on the port toerail. It was very hot but the epoxy stayed until I finished. Luckily, it was nice and cool in the boat (for both me and the epoxy) so once the epoxy was done, I went inside to relax and cool off. I was just cleaning up when Tom and Steph came by and it started to rain. Since the companionway steps were out of the boat, they had to do some acrobatics to get inside but they managed and we visited for a while as it poured outside. They stayed for about an hour until the rain stopped and then walked back to CMO but invited me over later so they could see the new stove burner tops I was going to pick up. I went over to Armando's workshop about 4, just as Elias came back to the boat to start taping the area around the nav station. I picked up the stove cover I had left and the new tops. They looked good. Of course, it started to rain again as I was going and I got soaked (again) but I got the pieces, paid Armando and went back to Destiny to try them out. Unfortunately, once everything was back in place, they didn't quite fit exactly - the cross supports were angled down and hit the burners themselves. The rear burner was higher than the rest and so that was unusable the way it was. I brought them back to Armando and he used a large, heavy rubber mallet to bend the supports parallel with the round piece. It certainly proved the welds were strong since he really had to bang the pieces to get them to bend a little. I brought them back to the boat and they were better, although I had to lower the rear burner to get it to sit right. The only other thing I noticed was that pots sat much closer to the flame now since these new tops were not as tall as the old ones. I wasn't sure if that would make any difference. Elias left around 5 and I went over to Mima. Steph made some snacks (deviled eggs that were excellent) and we just talked for a couple of hours and had some drinks. It was about 7:30 when I left and I wasn't even hungry for dinner, although we really didn't have much. |