On our 5th wedding anniversary, it’s a wrap!

Friday 9 Oct, HHN, boat winterizing day 9:
Up with the birds this morning. For some reason I’m excited. The boat will get shrink wrapped for the first time. Most owners just stay away when their boat is wrapped, but this one wants to watch it. Turns out it was a bit like watching paint dry – they took all day to do it.
It’s also our 5th wedding anniversary today. Sadly, we are apart, but we do spend some time on the phone, and flowers were appropriately sent in my absence 😊. Hard to think it’s 5 years already. We’ve had quite an adventure so far, and I wonder what the next 5 years will bring us?

Trae (the dude!) and his helper arrive at 9am. Or more to the point they arrive, Trae dumps all the gear and then leaves “to fill up with gas”, which takes him 3 hours. Nonetheless, his conscientious helper from El-Salvador starts the job. And for a moment I ponder: it’s odd that USA politics seem to be overly concerned with immigration when pretty much the entire country’s labour force comes from countries south of its border. Building “the wall” is surely a bit like UK leaving the EU free circulation zone – who, I ask, will do waitressing, garden & pool maintenance, clean cars, pick fruit and run hotels etc when there are no more fresh immigrants available?

As we don’t have the mast and boom up, the first job for the wrappers (… I don’t think that is the correct name for them!) is to make the tent-like structure: several 2-by-4 poles down the centerline and lines to the top guard rails holding them up. While this is done, I rather cheekily go onto the neighbouring boat and set up the GoPro on tripod on time lapse. Hopefully, the result will be a speeded-up version of the entire wrapping process.
Normally, I wouldn’t walk all over someone else’s boat, but this rather fancy “Sabre” motor boat is an exception. When I first arrived, I noticed all the hatches and windows were left open. On my first evening, when it started to rain, I went aboard and closed them all thinking it was the right thing to do. I later learned that this boat had recently sunk in the Chesapeake, under suspicious circumstances, and now there was an insurance wrangle over it. The owner wants to write it off and the insurance thinks otherwise. Once I’d learned this, I decided one evening to go have a look inside. Sure enough, while looking almost new on the outside, inside it is noticeably clear everything has been submerged. What a damned shame. My last look is in the walk-in engine room. But one step inside and … “Splosh”! my feet go into 1ft of oily sea water that fills the engine room. As I leave the boat with soggy shoes and socks, I now understand why leaving the hatches and windows open was not a problem!

Mid-afternoon, Trae & Co cut the plastic to length, pull it over the frame and start taping it to the rub rail. The trickiest part is the solar panels because I requested the panels to remain outside to catch the sun. Once the cover is on and secure, out come the heat guns to shrink the plastic. But despite their very tall step ladders, they still cannot reach the top of Cloudy. So the last part is completed by going inside the tent and doing it from inside. And while doing this they repeatedly call to each other … “you OK?”. This is because apparently it’s not uncommon for a guy to pass out inside the tent, due to lack of oxygen as the heat guns use it up! Hmmm, I hope I’ll be alright sleeping in there tonight!

As the sun sets, they are doing the finishing touches, like adding a zippable door for me to get in. I have to say, the end product is quite a work of art. And considering every boat is different there is quite a skill to this shrink wrapping.

While they are doing the wrapping, I continue pottering on the rigging, making a written inventory of all the items and what needs replacing, ready for me to shop around for the materials. Luckily, Selden places a serial number on the mast and this then links to their database that gives a list of all the various parts and how they are set up. Very useful.

Once the wrappers have left, I climb into my tent. Not really head room to the cockpit, but not far off. But going to the bow would be a crawl. There is still a smell of propane in the tent, but inside the boat the air is still fresh.
Tomorrow we will have a mast moving exercise and start cleaning all the rigging fittings that I plan to keep.