Discovery Day

Day 6, June 3, 2019.

Today was a discovery day.

Matt tackled more of the chainplate removal job.

Between rainfalls, he managed to pry the port and starboard chainplates out from up on deck.

As suspected, the port side wood was completely rotten, we could just poke a finger through and it would crumble 

The starboard side looks ok.

Today we have been taking many pauses during our work. Not because we're tired and need a break. It's more to do with needing to think the next steps through, to analyze and assess what really needs doing and how we should best tackle it.

Think before you do. Good practice for both of us, me especially since I tend to go full into project-mode before much consideration. Right, Matt?! 

So yes, if you were a fly on the wall today, you would've seen us pause a lot, deep in thought, eyes kind of glazed over.

I also spent some of the day going through all the secret hidden spaces in the boat and discovering all the spare parts that were left onboard.

It's always a good idea to know what equipment and tools you have before tackling a job, big or small.

Basically we know we have a lot of jobs to do, and so we want to make sure we work smart throughout it all. And that starts with doing an inventory, knowing what you have to work with.

Something we've also discovered today: The job you think will take 10 minutes will take at least half a day.

The jobs you are dreading because you think it will be difficult actually ends up being easy peasy lemon squeezy. 

Lesson? Expect the unexpected. Or just don't expect anything. 

We reached out to our online cruising community and coaches to see what our next action plan should be regarding these chainplates and the rotten wood.

There's an Endeavours Owner group on Facebook and one member was super helpful and even called us to talk us through our options. She also has an Endeavour 42 too and had to do a similar job on her boat.

Did I ever mention how supportive the cruising community is?! Wow!

We are taking it all in stride and like someone commented in the forum, we will get such a sense of pleasure and reassurance when we're in a gale or big seas, knowing that our rigging and chainplates are done properly because we took the time and effort to ensure this was done correctly.

Tomorrow we are also getting one of the guys who works in the boatyard here to have a look at it and give us his opinion.

Regardless of what else he finds, the bulkhead (interior structural wall) will have to be removed and remade due to the rot and then the chainplates will need to be rebolted again.

In order to this, we need a good sunny hot spell of weather! No good gluing and fiberglassing everything back together when there is still moisture in the air since moisture is what you want to keep out in the first place!

As nice as this cool temperature has been to work in, we are in need of some summer weather around here! Everyone is saying how late summer seems to be arriving. Hopefully it is just around the corner.

In the meantime, tomorrow IS sunny and dry, although not too hot but we'll take it So my day will be spent sanding and scraping the hull.

We were casually talking to the boatyard manager and he recommended a previous intern that had worked there to come and help us.

She is currently looking for some part time work and would love to help us with the hull, sanding and painting. Plus she is a super hard worker, bonus!

Tonight I went into Bridgewater to get some groceries while Matt finished off with the chainplates. We are soaking them in vinegar overnight to give them a good cleaning. Tomorrow we will be able to see if there is any deeper rust on them.

We had dinner in our cockpit again, this time with a gorgeous sunset show. After today's rain, there was a brilliant sky of pink and orange hues just as the sun was setting.

Highlight of the day: talking to one of my loveliest sweetest friends, Ritu Kumar who is living in Dubai. She's one of those friends that you can just pick up from anywhere, like you've just seen each other last week. Love you Pitu!!

Tomorrow is gonna be a gruelling day.... I can feel my arms burning already! 

We should've built in a massage budget into our plan. I think I will desperately need one after the next few days' work.

Night all! And Happy Eid to all my Muslim friends tomorrow.

Trying to pry off that top shelf. You can see the bulkhead that is the interior of that cupboard.

Here is the hole the chainplate goes through from the deck. See rotten wood.

Eeek! Rotten wood alert! 

Inside that cabinet is the rotten wood and bulkhead that will need to be 

disassembled (or even cut/smashed apart) before the repair can be made.

Chainplate is out!

See size of chain plate hole on port side.

Matt watching a boat getting launched into the water.

Hidden drawers everywhere! Inventory time.

Gold River Marina

This boat was being launched today. The wheels of the trailer got stuck a bit 
in the soft wet sand, but it all worked out.

Communal picnic and BBQ area for all boat owners at Gold River Marina.

It's a peachy break 🍑

This is how to open and close the fridge.

Here is our fridge. It is a top loader. The little contained
section in the right hand side is the freezer.

Sunset dinner.

The sun has come out! But still cold enough to wear a down jacket.

Not Knowing Is Not Failure. It Is The First Step To Understanding.

Day 5, June 2, 2019. 

Can't believe it's only the fifth day since we left Ottawa! It honestly feels like a month has passed.

Today was a day of firsts. We did some work on the boat that we have never done before. 

It's nerve-wracking to take the first step in whatever job you're trying to tackle. 

Thoughts running through my mind: Am I doing the correct thing? I don't want to screw this up. Do I have the right tool for this job? What if I make a mistake and it can't be corrected? Hmmm ok I guess I'll just go for it and see?

Aila wrote out a great little saying from school and brought it home a few weeks ago: "Not knowing is not failure. It is the first step to understanding."

How very fitting for today!

My first job today was to start scraping the hull. It wasn't too hard but you had to use quite a lot of muscle to really get the paint to come off. After 30 minutes and my arms and shoulders were already aching.

I tried a test section with the paint stripper and it was significantly easier.

It's better to use the paint stripper in the sun when it's not raining so I will continue doing that on the next sunny day, likely Tuesday according to the forecast.

It rained pretty steadily for most of the day. So onto some indoor jobs.

Based on our cruising coach's recommendation, we wanted to take out the chainplates so that we can better inspect them in case we need to replace them.  

Chainplates are what hold the rigging in place. And sometimes they can be rusty behind the bolt themselves, so you need to inspect them carefully.

There are chainplates on either side of the boat, left (port) and right (starboard) and also one in front (bow) and one in the back (aft). Chainplates are bolted on to a piece of wood to act as an 'anchor' so they stay solid and strong. Faulty chainplates are bad news.

Unfortunately the portside piece of wood is fairly rotten, likely from decades of rain and moisture seeping in. It will need replacing for sure.

To get these bolts and  chainplates off is no easy task. They are typically hiding behind some bulkhead (shelf/cupboard) and awkward to get to.

So our salon looks like all our tools had a massive rave party. 🤪 Tools and more tools everywhere!

We are getting good at moving very slowly and deliberately around the boat. Every single movement you must be careful not to step on something important or sharp. 

Even more important, you must not step or bump into something that might cause a domino effect where tools and equipment could go tumbling down into the bilge.

Also with all the rain that was coming down today, it gave us a chance to see which porthole (window) leaked. Unfortunately for us, there is a slight leak in our aft cabin's hatch (window, but bigger than a porthole). 

Now we have a piece of foam draped from the ceiling to catch any drops throughout the night. 

It was another productive day and we worked well together.

We found a fabulous radio station that blasted all the best tunes from the 80s and 90s... Great music to get us dancing and singing while we toil away.

Dinner was canned seafood chowder and instant noodles. Served in mugs, fancy style. We ate in the cockpit under our bimini enclosure which we put up this afternoon. Now we have a space outside to sit and relax too!

After dinner, we continued to take out the remaining chain plate bolts. Not easy when you can't see what you're actually doing and you have to contort your body and neck to actually get access to these bolts.  

We finished the day by washing our dishes and pots in the marina bathroom. 

Now watching the last of the Raptors game and ready to collapse into bed. 

My body aches from all the lifting and moving of boxes, scraping, going up and down the ladder, and just general use of muscle groups that I never regularly use! Who needs the gym anyway ?!

Tomorrow, more of the same. Except it will be canned beef stew for dinner since that's all we have left. 😋

Ain't that the truth today!

Waking up to a foam sheet diverting rainwater from my head.

So many hidden storage places. The key is to remember where everything is afterwards! 

Tools anyone?

Taking off the chainplates.

Head in the mast head hole.

Rotten wood. So soft the knife went through easily!

The bolt is off!

Whoaaa!!! Not Good :(

At least a couple of dozen times each day we climb up and down this ladder.

Looking down the ladder off the boat.

Let there be hot water!

Let there be coffee! Thanks Jillian Moon for the ⛵ mug. And that's the cover for
the French press that Aila made on her loom! 😍

Opening the top-loading fridge.

We discovered some pretty cool lights in our galley. 
All LEDs, they give some cool ambiance!

Fixing the Bimini enclosure.

Looking towards the front from the back.

Rainy view out of the cockpit. That big orange bag is our life raft.

Full Bimini and dodger enclosure in our cockpit. Great to be able to sit outside and not get wet.

Ready to scrape the hull!

About 45 minutes worth of scraping. Sooooo much more to do! 

You'll Never Walk Alone

Day 4, June 1, 2019. 

What day is it!? The days are starting to blur and I don't know what day of the week or date it is!

Today was a city day. Got up and literally jumped into the car, barely remembering to brush teeth. Did a mandatory coffee drive thru at Timmy's and then onwards to the Armadale Yacht Club in Halifax to meet some friends of a friend who had just finished cruising down to the Bahamas and back.

They were a wealth of knowledge about the anchorages and must sees along the way. They took the ICW route, which is what we are likely going to do as well.

The ICW (intracoastal waterway) is a series of canals that start in Norfolk, Virginia. They weave their way down south, all along fairly protected waterways until Florida. This is the "safer" option rather than sailing south in one huge hop along the Atlantic coastline of the USA.

However doing the big offshore hop will get you directly to the Bahamas or Caribbean within a couple of weeks, instead of meandering your way down day by day on the ICW.

There are pros and cons for choosing both routes and we're not 100% what we'll do.

It was great meeting you both Betty Ann and Rob! Hope we didn't leave your heads spinning too much with all our questions!

We then headed to the North Sails Yacht Shop where we dropped off our rigging for inspection.

Over the winter they also inspected and restitched our sails but we said we'll pick those up another day since we don't need them yet, and there is not much room to store them on board currently.

One of our major boat jobs to do while in the marina and on the hard (out of the water) is to sand and strip the entire hull of all its paint. The reason for this is that there are some parts that are already coming off and the hull is not entirely smooth. Once we strip the hull down to the epoxy layer and sand it smooth again, we paint antifouling on. The antifoul is to prevent growth on the hull as you sail, like barnacles and the like. The less growth on your boat, the faster it can sail, saving you time and ultimately money.

Besides sanding the current layer of paint away, you can also apply this paint stripper onto the hull. Paint it on, let it sit and then go around scraping it off bit by bit. Unfortunately the shop didn't have any more paint stripper so we had to go elsewhere.

We then went to Telus where Matt inquired about getting a SIM card since his number, previously paid for by his company, stops working at midnight tonight. For those trying to reach him, you can call me. My number will stay active until further notice.

Then we went to the Binnacle yacht shop, another chandlery (marine store) in Halifax. There we bought some paint stripper. They had 12 cans left. It doesn't come cheap though. 12 cans were over $1200!!! We have a big long hull so took them all and I don't even know if that'll be enough! We shall see. Poison is costly.

We raced to Lee Valley and bought a couple of carbide scrapers, apparently very good quality tool to have when scraping the hull.

Finally we took a break and went to Durty Nelly's Irish pub in downtown Halifax to watch the big Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspurs.

The atmosphere was absolutely, incredibly, unbelievably INSANE!

Liverpool won and I can't even describe how ecstatic and ridiculously happy everyone was when that last whistle blew.

We ended our city tour with a trip to Rona to get some body suits to wear when we do the painting and sanding, some tarps to cover the ground with, a mask and goggles for protection and a long outdoor extension cord so we can hook up for some power in the marina.

On the drive back to Gold River Marina, about 50 minutes, we called the kids. They were so happy and excited to tell us about their days, insisting that we do a video call instead of just talking on the phone. 

You have to understand, our kids HAtE speaking on the phone normally to people or will just answer in one word syllables. So to have them chatter away about their day with friends and at school was just awesome. At this very moment, I missed them so much and felt so guilty leaving them behind, and oh the tears! 😭

Me, not anyone else. 🙋🏻‍♀️

But I also felt a huge wave of gratitude for our friends Annie Plourde and Thierry Poiré for having the kids stay with them over the last few days.

Now the kids are with Kam Wong for the remainder of their Ottawa stay and there are some arranged play dates and birthdays with Paula TF and John Fand the Corkery's over the next couple of weekends.

It takes a village certainly and it's not only now that we have had to call upon our friends and family for help and support and childcare.

The lead-up to moving house, leaving our jobs, and getting our sail and safety training, etc, over the last year has taken many sacrifices and time away from our kids.

Right now I just feel so blessed Matt and I can do the initial legwork of all these boat jobs without distraction and having to worry about the kids' safety while we are sanding, painting, etc.

June 10th is when Tai and Aila will fly out to Halifax with my dad. This makes us more motivated to get as much done as possible before they arrive!

I think it is finally sinking in that this life and this world is our new reality, for the foreseeable future at least.

Getting boat jobs done that we have been talking about for months, visualizing our cruising route, gaining more knowledge and information everyday, and just meeting more people in the boatyard who are all so curious about us and our cruising plans.... All of it adds up and I find myself giddy being able to call ourselves 'liveaboards' now.

We still don't have water, heating, electricity or propane, but we are essentially living aboard. Good enough for me.

Tomorrow there is an extreme weather warning: extensive rain and wind. So indoor jobs it is!

Man, I've just written a thesis! 😛

Thanks for reading up until now.

GO LIVERPOOL GO!!

Solar lantern dinner :)

You'll Never Walk Alone