I Am Alive . . . Really!

SHIP'S LOG:

When last I wrote, I was beginning to get really into the work of getting ABISHAG ready for the season. But as I said before, every time you begin a project, you always uncover more that has to be done and have to do a couple of extra projects just to get to the one you wanted to get to in the first place. Take spot painting.

The bottom of a boat must be painted every year to keep the sea creatures from taking up residence on it and so slowing the speed at which the boat will travel. To this end, bottom pains that make the bottom of the boat in hospitable to the creatures have been developed. The paints come in two basic formulas: hard and ablative. The hard paints create a hard finish that constantly leaches out a biocide keeping the little sea creatures at bay. The down side is that this type of paint has to be sanded off and re-applied each year. Lots of messy, miserable work. The second type, the ablative, is a soft paint which "wears away" a little bit at a time to release the biocide. This means that you only have to replace the paint at those places where it has worn all the way down to the barrier coat. Np sanding, no mess, no real fuss . . . sort of.

I use an ablative paint as have spent too many years lying on on my back with a sander in my hand trying to get at spots of hard paint that needed to be sanded. Age and arthritis and lots of common sense dictated the move. And so it is that I have been going around the boat each day, painting and repainting spots where the bottom paint had been worn down to the barrier coat. Most of it actually came from the fact that ABISHAG had been in the water for almost three years and needed to be repainted. And then there was the ICW and those groundings. All the sand and clay and mud that she plowed through did a fine job of sanding off the paint on the bottom of the keel. In addition, there were dozens of spots where water had gotten behind the paint and broke its adhesion tot he hull and so it had to be scraped off and repaint. So I went around and around the hull and touched up every place where the barrier coat was exposed, covering it and building up, or at least trying to, the bottom coating so that it will be, when the whole hull is painted, the same depth.

It seems a simple and rather innocuous task but nothing on a boat is that simple or that innocuous. Checking the hull after the first spot painting show up a wet spot on the rudder. It was clear when I was doing the painting that this spot had been repaired. Unfortunately, it was a bad repair and water got in which was made clear in that it bled through the paint. So it was that a simple spot painting job turned into a rudder repair job . . . . sand off the paint to expose the repair, gouge out the old repair, flush the old repair to get out the salt water & the acid it produces when it mixes with fiberglass resin, mix up some epoxy filler and fill the site, wait for the epoxy to dry and harden, sand and repaint, then wait 24 hours to see if the site "weeped" again. ( It didn't!) All that from just "spot painting!"

Doing a major clean of the boat, the first of three, did turn up some treasure. I found a submersible bilge pump which, if it works - a real question - will solve the forepeak water problem All I need to do is wire it to a float switch so that it will turn on and off appropriately and then wire it to a bus bar to get it juice. And then run a hose from the pump to the bilge. Like I said simple.

The area under the engine underwent a major, MAJOR cleaning. Over the last couple of years, I have cleaned out the sump but really haven't been able to give this area more than a like and a promise. Now, with ABISHAG on land and not moving, I could dam up this area and fill it with bilge cleaner, Joy dish washing liquid, degreaser and a host of other concoctions designed to deal with the dropping of a diesel engine. Thirty-four years of such dropping, along with the odd spill during a fuel filter change or an engine oil change, plus the heat of the engine right above this pool, created a substance close to tar. Mix into it sand and dirt(how they got there I have no clue) and you had a fine sludge that could be loosened up but could only be removed by the handful.I t required either draping myself over the engine or lying along side of it thrusting my arm underneath, to pull the foul-smelling sludge out by the handful. It took almost a full day to get it down and still, with all the effort and chemical assistance, there were certain areas on the far side of the engine I couldn't get to. They got the chemical bath but their cleaning will have to await the launching and sailing of ABISHAG when the action of the "bilge cleaners" will slowly loosen the and slosh that unreachable sludge into the sump. The clean up produced to large bolts and a 2" diameter copper washer from the depths of the sludge. I can't even begin to figure out where they went but I hope that they were accidentally dropped into the bilge during some repair and the former owner decided against try to retrieve them. There were also several quarters in the sludge though I doubt that anyone but a bank would take them. Being partially copper these days, they don't fair well in such sludge and look rather "suspicious!".