Dis-repair

We are slowly moving forward with plans to get the boat repaired after the accident last week. We have been very fortunate that the sailing community is so incredibly supportive and well connected. We have had so many people offer support and help to get Seasura in a state ready to travel to a repair location. We truly appreciate this support. In particular, we have some amazing people that supported us the night it happened and even made us breakfast the next morning when we were recovering. They also helped pick up supplies for the repair and generally checked in daily. I feel so lucky to have such lovely people in our lives.

We started the repairs the next day by clearing out the bow locker and Owen’s room. He thought about sleeping in the crew cabin, but it quickly became apparent that we would have to be turning the crew cabin back into a storage space! We moved almost everything from the bow locker back into the crew cabin, except the oodles of ropes we have. Those just went on the catwalk between the trampolines. The dining table is now Owen’s bed. Fortuantely, we had purchased a mattress to fit the table so that we could turn it into a bed for guests or use on overnight passages. Now, every night we set him up to sleep on it and every day we take his bed apart and turn it back into a dining table. Good thing too, because our outside table has turned into a work bench!

The following day we took an adventure to shore and went to the hardware store to get a large sheet of plywood to sandwich the bulkhead between. We took our dinghy one bay over and beached it on a beautiful beach with condos and rentals dotting the shore. We then walked up to the road and walked a kilometer down the road to the hardware store. We got a large piece of plywood and had them cut it in two so that we could carry it better. We were very happy to have a local women offer to drive us back to the beach when she saw us walking along the side of the road with two large pieces of plywood. She was saying that she had ‘rescued’ many people that day and it was just in her nature to do so. She was very sweet. The approach to the beach was fairly flat and the tide was going out when we arrived, which meant that when we got back to the dinghy, it was beached. It takes a great deal of effort for Owen, Halyna, Kevin and I to move our very heavy dinghy on shore. But with push and shove, we eventually got it back in the water. We loaded the plywood in with the rest of us and road back to Seasura. I am sure we looked like quite the sight with large 4 x 4 squares of plywood and several people in our dinghy.

That evening, Kevin and Owen prepared the large area of the hull in his room that needed repairing. Beyond the cracking on the outside and the crumpled bulkhead, the adjacent hull section was all delaminated, meaning the different layers of fiberglass that make it up were peeling away from each other and are a weak spot. Our boat is made with a foam core and fiberglass on either side of it. It was made with a injected resin technique; meaning that a mold was created an. . . At the time it was constructed, it was quite novel. This is why we want to make sure we have the right people repair it. So, to start the temporary repair, Kevin cut away the delaminated section of the fiberglass. The following day we filled it with epoxy and fiberglass and put a large piece of fiberglass over the defect overlapping the surrounding undamaged area for strength. Part of the foam came away when we were cutting out the delaminated section, so Kevin replaced it will some fast forming foam. The kids loved watching this stuff grow. Owen even took a time lapse video of it, but I won’t post that video, it is sort of like watching paint dry!

Fiberglassing is messy business. Not only do you get fiberglass everywhere, even when trying very hard not to, but then you have to add in epoxy to the mix. Needless to say, we go through a lot of gloves and have lots of plastic sheets or garbage bags put down to protect surfaces. We are pretty happy the end result of our job though. We did the section in the bow locker the next day and we think the boat is much more secure. Unfortunately, the end of the crack in the bow locker does have some weeping from it, so we clearly have to do a repair of the outside of the boat as well. Kevin was thinking about putting some fast cure sealant in the crack on the outside, but now that he found the weeping, he is going to grind the crack down a little and lay down some fiberglass on the outside as well. This means that we are going to have to beach the boat because the one crack goes right down to the water line.

After two days of hard repair work, we spent the next day at the beach for a friend’s birthday party. It was a nice place to hangout and we even explored an ‘Art Trail’ that has been put together here by previous cruisers. People contribute art to the edge of the trail, made of things from nature and usually with their boat name on it. It is interesting to see how creative people can be. Some of our friends that were spending more time in the Exuma’s caught up with us this week and the kids enjoyed playing with each other in the water and on the beach. We hope we can get them together a few more times before we head back to Florida for repairs.

Our next part of the repair was applying the plywood to the bulkhead. Kevin figured it was best to reinforce the bulkhead by sandwiching it between plywood, using screws and epoxy to affix them. We also used the extra plywood to make new slats for Owen’s bed because four of them were destroyed in the accident. And because that wasn’t enough for one day, we also decided that was the day that we would slow roast a pork shoulder and make ourselves some pulled pork. Kevin and his dad, with a little of my help, used to do some barbeque competitions, and everyone once in a while we get the craving for some pulled pork or brisket. Of course, we only had our oven to use instead of a proper barbeque, but it still turned out pretty good, just not smokey at all. We were happy to have the nice meal after the day of work.

To close out the week, we spent Sunday doing nothing! We relaxed and went swimming off the back of the boat. We aren’t the bravest or most adventours people in the water, but we are slowly getting more comfortable, especially Owen and Halyna. Owen, Halyna and I swam down the chain to the sandy bottom and all the kids and I practiced our jumping style.