Daily Life
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Hindsight is 20/20
This last few weeks has been challenging because we haven’t been able to do much on the repair! We were waiting for supplies to arrive. Also, I had another reaction with my hands. We are now suspicious that it was a reaction to the styrene in the resin because apparently gloves do a poor job of preventing it from getting through. This meant I was out of commition for a few days with very swollen sore hands again. Furthermore, Kevin hurt his back and has been very limited in his activities for over week now. He is slowly recovering but it has really put a damper on the repair job.…
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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…
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We have a replacement piece!
Another week gone by and we have managed to get ourselves a new piece to fit into our boat! The infusion was quite the experience. It took us many tries to get the vacuum set up properly on the mold. Eventually what worked was, taking everything off and applying three thin layers of resin to it. We think there were tiny pinholes in the mold that prevented the vacuum from fully forming. When we made the mold, the bottom layer of fiberglass did not appear to be fully saturated because there were tiny white bubbles. Kevin had filled them a little with Bondo, and then wax, but we suspect this…
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Boatyard life
Since my last post we have moved out of the Airbnb’s and onto the boat again. I wish I could say that it was because our boat was almost ready and we were going back in the water, but that is far from the case. It has been challenging to be on the boat while on the hard, but there are still many benefits. The kids have rolled with all the challenges. We are able to use much of the functions of our boat, including the electricity (for lighting and cooking), the starlink for internet, and some running water. However, the sinks drain into either the gray water tanks (that…
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Building a mold
The last week we have been working hard on creating our mold from which we will build our new piece of hull. We have had some reassuring visits from other people in the boatyard, that have done this sort of work in the past, who say that they would do it the same way! It is reassuring, not because I thought Kevin didn’t know what he was doing, but because we have also had several people ask if we really needed to be do as much as we are doing. The answer is yes! There really was that much damage and we really did need to do that much repair.…
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Sand and shape, sand and shape
There isn’t as much to report on this week because almost all our time has been dedicated to repairing the boat. We now have a monstrous hole in our starboard forward hull! You can see into Owen’s cabin AND the starboard bow locker, at the same time, from the outside. I will try to detail what we have done for the repair. Kevin spent a great deal of time trying determining the amount of damange and smoothing out the outside hull to be used as a form to create a mold from. While he was doing this, I continued to dismantled Owen’s cabin, including the shelving, his bed and the…
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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…
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Patched up and heading north
Sorry this has been a long time coming. It has been a doozy of a couple weeks. I am currently in Victoria doing some work and Kevin is at the boat with the kids taking it to Florida and the boatyard in preparation for our haul out date on March 12th. After my last post, we had the exciting/nerve wracking experience of beaching our boat so that we could do some repairs to the outside cracks that went below the water line. Once we realized that two of the larger cracks inside were actually weeping water, we knew it was necessary for us to patch the outside as well. In…
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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…
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On and off the boat in Georgetown
Turns out Georgetown is quite the hub for cruisers. We have come across several boats that spend several months here in Georgetown. Otherwise, it is full of cruisers that are traveling around the Bahamas and taking stopping here to take advantag of the shops. There are few more shops here than you will find in most of the smaller islands and cays. I say a few more shops, because there are still only a very few. When we first ‘landed’ in Georgetown it seemed that the island had invested very little into infrastructure. Downtown lacks sidewalks and the roads are spotted with potholes. But then, when we caught a cab…
