Sweating it out

Three weeks off boat work and we are back at it. It was nice to step away from the boat for a bit and do something else. Kevin and the kids were at his parents doing schoolwork and going swimming every day. I went to Victoria and worked. It really put me in the mindset of heading home. The kids and Kevin, on the other hand, mostly just felt displaced. It is a strange thing to be moving all over the place and not feel like you have a real home. Our boat is our home now, but we also know it is not going to be for much longer and there are things missing on it. Also, our home has been damaged and is not as comfortable and functional as it should be.

We returned to Florida and it is hot! We were not used to the cooler weather in Vancouver/Victoria yet, but we are also not used to the heat of a Florida summer. We are missing the air-conditioner on our boat. Our air-conditioner/heater only works when we are in the water, so we are without it while in the boatyard. It makes for hot sticky sleeps, with wide open windows that let in all the mosquitos. However, we also enjoy the lack of rain, which means we can be outside doing stuff most of the time. Yesterday we bought ourselves a portable air-conditioner to help with the heat, but it runs on a different power than the boatyard provides. We, therefore, have to put together a converter for it to function. That is our task for tomorrow. We would do it today, but everything is closed for Memorial Day weekend.

We took another good look at the infused replacement piece we finished just before we left and ultimately decided we have to make it again. There were dry patches in it and areas of whitish haze that we weren’t sure what they were. So, we did some investigating. Kevin routered down a few layers and looked at the white spots with a microscope (we have this cool hand-held microscope for the kids science that puts images onto our phone to look at). Turned out the whitish haze areas were areas that were not fully infused at a deeper layer (i.e. there was dry fiberglass that would make the layers adhere to each other poorly). There were many areas that had the whitish haze, but also many areas that were properly infused. We debated for several days about whether to repair the piece or start again. We couldn’t find an answer anywhere as to how the overall strength of the piece would be affected by the dry patches. It was a hard decision to start over, because it puts us back at last a week or so. We had been consulting with other people, the internet, and Kevin’s composite books and finally, a fiberglass repair guy happened to be in the boatyard one day and Kevin was able to ask his opinion. He agreed we needed to remake it. There wasn’t any guarantee that the dry patches wouldn’t compromise the strength of the piece, and although we have no plans to be hit in the same place on the boat in the future, we are now very aware that things don’t go according to plan! Furthermore, turns out repairing all the dry patches would also take way too much time. So, this Memorial Day weekend, we are also waiting for the fiberglass stores to open up again so we can replenish our supplies for another go at the infusion. We suspect that we need to use a different resin with a longer curing time than the one we used previously, to avoid those dry areas. At the time, we only had 30 minutes and we we were vibrating parts of the mold to help move the infusion through the areas more quickly so it wouldn’t set before it got there. Hopefully we can avoid this with a longer curing time. Live and learn.

Meanwhile, we are going to work on other projects around the boat, get used to the heat and spend some time at the local playgrounds after school days. We might throw in a couple of trips to the ice cream shops as well. I hope to have more to write on the repair job by next week.