June 2006 Log

June 22, 2006

It is now just a mere 4 weeks until our departure on our 18 month sabbatical cruise.

We are are currently at Shelter Island Marina in the boat yard. The boat has already been here 6 weeks.We have just come back home from another gruelling night of boat work.

Tonight Carllie and I put 2 more coats of yellow paint on the hulls. It was one of the jobs that we decided to do as the original yellow paint of 7 years ago was starting to look a little worn. It is a real team effort to paint. Because we don;t have the facilites to spray paint, we are "roling and tipping". This means that I roll on a small strip of paint and then Carlie quickly knocks down the bubbles with a foam brush and blends it in to the previous section before the paint sets up. If it is timed well and it is not too hot or windy you can get an almost sprayed on look

These last few weeks have just flown by. We are both excited at the change to the on-the-water lifestyle and the cutting of land ties but we do have the occasional trepidations that we are doing the right thing. Time will tell....

Well it is 2 am and I am beat. That 6:30 am alarm is going to come mighty fast....

I still have a list 2 pages long of all the things to do on the boat to prepare for this offshore trip. Click here to view the current list.

June 23, 2006

It is Friday night and I picked up Carllie after work and we did our regular pilgrimmage out to the boatyard. We had our regular pre-work session snack of sushi to tied us over until we can have dinner later. Tonight's project is the final two coats of clear coat over the yellow on the hulls. The weather is perfect for it with no breeze. If there is too much wind the paint sets up too fast and we are not able to blend it in properly. We are finished by 9 pm (only three hours) but we are too late for our favorite chinese food restaurant of Shanghai Palace (Granville and 64th - George and his staff have the best food and service) so we instead on order pizza from Zachary's Pizza (15th and Oak - best pizza in Vancouver - that's 2 commercial plugs in 1 sentence!) and head home to watch another video episode of "Lost".

Saturday June 24, 2006

Carllie went to work for her last day at West Marine as a cashier and I headed out early to the boatyard to try and and paint on our new non-slip paint on the deck. Like most things it sounds easy enough but it turns out into alot more work. I had to mask all the areas that were not going to get the nonskid paint and then carefully sand the areas to be painted. It is the hottest day this year in Vancouver at 90 degrees (32 celcius). Well eight hours later I have almost finsidhed the sanding but not ready to paint. It always seems I underestimate the time by a factor of three. I think I can do it in 8 hours it turns out to be 24!

Sunday June 25, 2006

Another hot day dawns and time for some more sanding and painting while Carllie continues to pack stuff in our apartment into four piles:

• storage locker
• boat
• flea market
• garbage

It seems that our small 400 square foot apartment is slowly emptying but after 23 years of living there we still have managed to accumulate alot of "stuff". They say it is a good idea to move 5 years and I can see why. We had actually ready of a natural healing type doctor, Dr Richard Shulze, not sure on his web site, who uses as one of his healing techniques something called "Trashing" as well the right eating, drinking lots of water, breathing, liver cleanses etc. The essence of the "Trashing" technique is that people who are very sick, ie cancer,etc) should throw out 1/3 of everthing they own. Usually people are hanging onto physical objects that have alot of mental baggage that goes along with them and until they can get rid of some of these physical things they can't get rid of the attitudes and tensions that have got them sick.

But I digress, meanwhile back at the boatyard it is another very hot day of sanding and painting of the deck. I had bought 2 gallons of this very very expensive deck paint for boats with these little rubber particles to make the deck non-slip. As I applied it using the recommended roller technique all the little rubber pieces kind of bunched up. I was only able to put on one coat with the two gallons, not the recommended two. When I brought Carllie to the boat later that evening she commented rather unenthusiastically that it "looked like someone had thrown up on the deck." I then asked her what she really thought of it... anyways I tried to convince her that when I put on the next coat (using a brush only) it would look alot better. She remained very skeptical.

Monday and Tuesday June 26 and 27, 2006

These were non-boat work days as I still had to complete a computer programming project before we left town and unfortunately had to work to 3 am both days while Carllie continued to pack. I knew that on the coming weekend on move out day we had to pull a couple of all nighters but I was concerned that so early in the week we were already becoming sleep deprived.

Wednesday June 28, 2006

We had scheduled the boatyard to put our boat into the boatyard on Thursday but there were still a whole bunch of things to do before that could happen. I picked up Carllie after work and we wnt out to the boat and worked away. At 3 am and exhausted we had done enough of the jobs so we could launch the next day.

Thursday June 29, 2006 - Light Wave Relaunching

Everytime your boat is launched it is a seemingly very stressful time. Nash, the Travelift operator and his assistant Dave arrived promptly at 3:30 pm and strapped up the boat and lifted it high into the air while I painted bottom pain bt under the keels and disassembled the temporary shed I had attached to the back of the boat to shelter my painting stuff and tools. After travelling the 1/2 mile trhough the boatyard to the launching dock at 3 mph Light Wave was back in her true water element by 4 pm.

We still had to clean up our worksite and our good friend Ross Tanner lended a hand as we packed all our boat repair equipment into the boat, car, garbage, or gave it away to some of our boat yard friends. By 8 pm everthing was cleaned up and Ross and I were ready for our trip up the south arm of theto Fraser River to New Westminster and then down the north arm to the River Rock Marina where we will keep the boat until we leave on July 22 while Carllie would take the car and meet us there.

Ross and I had great fun playing with the newly installed radar tracking the tugboats that were zipping around us, bridges, and buoys. We both felt it would be an invaluable tool in the fog off the westcoast as we head down past Washington and Oregon. At 11pm we were safely tied up at the marina and called it an early night.

Friday June 30, 2006

It was last day of formal 9 to 5 workdays for quite awhile. The evening was spent with what else bu tmore packing. We packed all night until 5 am. I am too tired to write about more packing ...