Tuesday 22 Oct, HHN day 11: Still heavy on the jobs list, but continuous rain sets us back a bit.
Dull rainy day again so we start the jobs inside first, sanding the bilge under the galley sink, where we glassed in the excess thru-hull holes. Same as before, executed while dangling upside down from under the galley! Glen wet-sands to avoid yet more dust in the boat.
Once rain stops briefly, it’s outside on the same sanding theme, wet sanding the various items: front of the keel bulb, the water line and over the hull patches. Wet sanding with an electric sanding machine is not exactly safety compliant! He waterproofed the sander with a plastic bag, and jokes “not wearing a life jacket is nothing compared to this act with potential electrocution!” and “this sanding technique could be hair raising”. He’s done it before, and as long as I still hear the sander vibrating on the hull, I know he is fine.
On the keel bulb he needs to prepare the area where he will apply epoxy filler (in the dents from our last grounding).
Along the water line he sands particularly the areas where the slings of the travel lift get positioned. After we antifouled last December in Antigua, the paint wasn’t fully dry when we were lifted in the slings, hence some caterpillar looking like tracks remained on the hull. The appearance of which bugged us big time. Now we need to make the surface smooth again before painting.
Next he takes off the anodes: 2 on the shaft, 2 on the Gori prop, and 2 on the bow thruster. All still looking half reasonable. Always a debate whether we just put them back on or replace with new. The complete new set being over $300!
Lastly the bow thruster propellers come off and the tunnel scraped of barnacles. They just love multiplying in the bow thruster where it’s hard to get to them 🙁
When rain gets unbearable, Glen gives up on the outdoors jobs. And once inside he spends several hours with his new Mastervolt MPPT for the soon-to-be-installed bimini solar panels, contemplating where to run the wires and where to mount the controllers. We don’t want to drill any holes in the teak, not even inside our wardrobes. So the plan (as of now) is to install them neatly (of course) on a panel in the engine room. We had bought 100ft of solar wiring for the job. But on new calculation what we need is more like 160ft from panels to controllers. Hard to believe. We will have 6 extra panels mounted on the bimini, in 2 arrays of 3 panels in series. This will make our total solar capacity of 900watts. Good for keeping our fuel consumption as low as possible across the Pacific – where reliably clean fuel can be hard to come by.
It’s been a bit depressing with the constant rain today, but we did still manage to move forward (slightly) on our jobs list. And me? I continued inside, in the warm, attacking cupboards, cleaning mildew and reorganizing. Feels a bit like Gibraltar when we first got the boat. Talking of which, we are still eating food supplied from Gibraltar!