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Crtd 11-10-26 Lastedit 14-08-20
Closing the
hull
U-turn Journal #10
Bow on
land, but fortunately we could continue living in the ship
My
admiration for Charles' fitting was a bit fast. It needed two more days and
some staunch troubleshooting from my side to finally get the planks in properly. But we did it!
We decided to patch this bow triangle stiffener bloc, which caught the rot from the adjacent piri piri plank, in veneration of the mninga wood it is made of, with a chunk of Sese Island mukusu. Background: my latest carving pride, a 3.5 m crocodile starboard on the steering deck
The joints, 5 to 9 mm wide, looking much wider in unforgiving outside light, to be filled with blanket fibre hammered in then covered with a porridge made of epoxy paint and saw dust (like we did on Banda)
Epoxy paint on top, harder than metal, you can't sand it off not even with a machine
It was quite a bit more than "closing a leak", but we think we did a good job.
We went back in the water singing to our 32 Ton hydraulic jack Nina Simone's "my baby just cares for me". (compare how we got back in without jack last time on Banda)
Our new plank joints are tight but we do have some leakage through some other front joints that cracked because under water hull planks drying on land contract. It is not much and we hope they will close, as they often do, now the planks get wet again and expand. This underwater plank replacement job was small and easy compared to our interior upgrade (see previous issues of this U-Turn Journal) but the psychological burden is considerably heavier since the usefulness of all work we did depends on whether we would manage to stay afloat. I'm pretty fed up with the prominence of ship work since a year ago I made my U-turn. Time to occupy myself with golf, jazz music, history and philosophy reading, and start boring my blog readers again with the ensuing real nonsense! All that remains is making the new mast, and (oh, my God how?) mounting it.