Wednesday 12 December, Jolly Harbour Yard, day 2: Drill holes in the hull for fridges keel coolers, peel off more varnish and scrape more antifoul.
No rest for the wicked! To bed at midnight, up at 7am to start while it is still cool. The night was not so bad after all. Once we’d zapped all the mosquitoes and put the bedroom fans on us, we slept just fine.
The yard is buzzing even at this time in the morning, with contractors working on most of the boats around us.
Last night Glen finished sanding the aft gunwale in the starboard side, by feel, and now we are eager to see how it came off. The teak is lovely golden color, only if it would stay that way…
We peeled off the Coelan along the full length on starboard side, but under the edges there are bits left. So Glen is masking off the glass fiber and will throw himself into a sanding frenzy.
Craig also started his chemical strip job underneath the boat, so we have a good start this morning. And soon, a helper joins him so both under sides of the boat are now in the process of being scraped off. They are moving, slowly but steadily. It is a horrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it.
After having enough of masking and sanding (or better said when he got too hot), Glen moves indoors for the big job: drilling holes in the hull to install the new keel coolers for the fridges.
He has been contemplated on where to drill for quite some time now, so he is positive he got the right position. Then measure twice, drill once. And we have the first hole. Ouch! Poor Cloudy Bay :(. Very painful to watch. And shocking (for me) to see just how thin the hull is. Maybe 1.5cm thick. Never thought it is this thin. Hm… that will certainly give me some food for thoughts… and nightmares. Wish I hadn’t seen that.
Then the second and the third holes are drilled, and this part of the job is finished. Now we’ll have to wait for Jesse’s guys to do the InterProtect coatings, and then we can proceed with fitting the coolers.
For the afternoon we are back on the deck, for the time consuming job of sanding under the edges of the gunwale. Looks perfect, ready for varnishing. Speaking of which, yet another team approaches us offering varnishing services. There seems to be an army of them here in Antigua.
But we still have second thoughts whether we should varnish or not. We love the look, but kind of reluctant at maintaining it twice a year.
And on this note, once it cools down a bit, we attack the gunwale on the port side, to peel off the Coelan. Again, very sad to see it gone. We are faster this evening, we seem to have improved our techniques. By 7pm we give up, almost finished, as mosquitoes are terrorizing us.
This evening we lock ourselves into the boat with all windows open but with mosquito nets pulled over. And surprisingly the heat seems much more bearable this evening than last. Probably last evening we were over exerting ourselves with the fury of the mosquitoes!
Early night tonight. Clearly the early morning is the best time to be working outside.
