Back to the boat and the boatyard

I am still waiting for Halyna to update the blog on what she and the others were doing for the two weeks that I was home working. I do know, that they made their way quickly to West Palm Beach from Nassau just after I left. They spent the majority of the time there doing chores, restocking the fridge, doing schoolwork and biding their time until I returned. They moved the boat up to Fort Pierce the day before I got back so that we were just one day away from Port Canaveral where we were to have our boat hauled out to do the hull repair.

I returned on a flight that was delayed on the Vancouver tarmac for an hour and a half due to a thunderstorm in Texas. But I was fortuante enough to get a non-stop flight from Vancouver to Miami. It was pretty nice to have less travel hassle. When I finally arrived my family was there to greet me at the airport shortly after my bags arrived, and I was very happy to see them. By the time I arrived it was dinner time and we all went to “Little Havana” in Miami for a Cuban dinner. We had tasty pulled pork and empanadas. We are very much hoping that despite the boat repair, we will still at least make it to Cuba for a short visit. On the other hand, we have come to realize that it is very unlikely that we will get much further. After such a big repair (we are just now getting into the true cost of the repair) we will have to move the boat to a boatyard in the U.S., out of the hurricane zone, and put it up on the hard, putting an end to our trip. We are fortuante that we at least got the time we did and we have had the experiences that we did but it will likely leave all of us wanting for more!

The day after arriving back in Florida, we returned the rental car that Kevin had borrowed to pick me up and scootered back to the boat. Being back in the U.S., we are able to put our scooters to use again as the streets are more conducive to sharing the road with cars. This scooter ride was notable also because we rode by an intersection of Fort Pierce dedicated to peacocks. At first, all we saw were murals and knick knacks related to peacocks and a ‘peacocks crossing’ sign. However, about a half block past the intersection we found a congregation of peafowl. In fact, there were about 20 of them standing on the steps of a store front! Further along the scooter ride, we saw a large group of pelicans. They are surprisingly large birds when seen next to people.

From Fort Pierce, we motored up to Port Canaveral. It took the remainder of the day and we arrived at Port Canaveral around 6pm. Luckily, with the onset of daylight savings we still had plenty of time to go under the bridge, through the lock and anchor just inside the Banana River before dark. Our anchorage meant that we could easily get back to the marina and boatyard on Tuesday for our haul out time. The lock was an interesting experience. We haven’t gone through a lock before. We were surprised how much the water level changed when it looked like it wasn’t even any different. Our challenge was tying off to the bumper system while waiting for the water level to rise. I am just not that good at throwing ropes apparently, despite all my practice in the last year.

The following day was Owen’s birthday. We started it with what is usually our Sunday morning breakfast (we missed it on our travels the day before). We went to shore after and put our scooters to use. We were exploring what Port Canaveral had to offer, and in particular the corner of the city near the ports where we will be spending most of the next 3+ weeks. It was fun to be on the scooters again, although Simon’s didn’t last the whole time. We were also happy that the little kids’ scooters actually worked. We risked putting them in the bowlockers for storage and after several months there were already several areas of corrosion. Life on the water is very hard on many things (especially salt, sugar and baking soda which all tend to clump together with the constant moisture and really affect my baking at times). That evening we had our usual birthday celebration for Owen; dinner of his choice, cake and some present opening.

Tuesday we got hauled out of the water. Kevin did a great job driving the boat back through the lock, under the bridge and into the haul out dock which is pretty narrow. They took several minutes to arrange the straps that would lift our boat out of the water, only to discover that with the boat facing into the travelift, the forestay would hit the anterior bar. So, they lowered the boat back into the water and Kevin backed it up, turned it around and backed into the very narrow haul-out dock. That was successful. The kids loved watching travelift in action, even if none of us is actually excited to see our boat up on land when it is supposed to be in the water. We spent the next few hours packing up our things, picking up the rental car and moving ourselves into our AirBNB. We originally thought we would just stay on the boat while it was on the hard, but then we remembered Simon falling down the ladder in Carriacou, and decided we didn’t want to have to use the boatyards bathroom in the middle of the night. Furthermore, we wouldn’t have the use of our kitchen sink while on land, and it would be difficult to make dinner without being able to easily wash our dishes. We hope that the cost of the AirBNB will balance itself out when we eat in every night instead of going out for dinner. The rest of the afternoon we drove around picking up packages of repair supplies and buying a vaccum sander that would allow us to sand down the bottom paint on the outside of the hull.

After a bit of a slow start the next morning, we got to the boat and immediately started demolition of Owen’s cabin and the preparation of the oustide hull. Our boat was built with vacuum resin infusion (which means the layers were layed out and then a vacuum was applied to the whole structure and resin was infused in and sucked down between the layers). To renew our hull to it’s original strength and performance, we need to repair the hull in the same way. Therefore, this is what Kevin is planning for the repair; he is going to sand and fair (or smooth out the dents and rouch edges) of our damaged hull. Then, we are going to cut out the damanged hull section, which is about 2 meters by 4 meters in area, and lay it on a support system on the ground. From that, we will create a mold of our hull. We want to preserve the shape of our hull as much as possible so that it will perform like new when the repairs are done, which is why we are using the original hull as a mold rather than just cutting out the hull and filling in the space with large sheets of fiberglass and fairing after. After the mold is made, it will be glued up in place and we will build the new hull, working from the inside, laying the fiberglass layers from the outside against the mold to the inside. A foam core will be added and then the interior fiberglass will be added. It is complex and has many steps, but Kevin thinks it will produce the best repair job. The fiberglass layers will be fused together using a vacuum-resin infusion technique like the original boat. This part excites Owen because we will not have to work with all the epoxy-soaked fiberglass sheets while building up the layers. And there will be a lot of layers, so that would be very very messy. Hopefully the pictures of our repair, will make all of this more clear as we go along.

It is sad to see the destruction of Owen’s cabin. We had to take apart the shelving unit in his cabin to access the full inside hull and we were not able to find a way to presevere all the wood used to build the shelves as they were glue in place with a very strong adhesive. Once the hull and bulkhead are repaired, then we will have to do some woodworking to rebuild his shelves.

We spent the next several days with Kevin sanding the outside hull and me destroying Owen’s Cabin. Owen helped where he could, mostly along side his dad doing the sanding. Halyna took the opportunity, while the boat is on the hard, to clean the propellers of the built-up barnacles. The little kids spend most of their time riding their scooters around the boatyard, intermittantly scrapping barnacles off the hull. Spring Break came early to our boat, as Kevin and I don’t do as good a job monitoring school work when we are doing big labour jobs. We are otherwise trying to enjoy the benefits of living on land again like the use of a dishwasher, constant use of a washer, drier and showers without worrying about the amount of water we are using, regular runs, and no-worry toilets! The benefit to living in Port Canaveral is that we get to see all the SpaceX launches! Lastly, our current AirBNB is the Peacock Retreat and there are actually a lot of peafowl around here. Yes, more peacocks. There are so many you would think that peafowl were native to Florida and not India and Sri Lanka. The kids enjoy watching the social dynamics of the neighbourhood peakcocks and peahens.