26 Februart, 2018

26 February 2018

We’ve been given pink and yellow grapefruit, oranges and tangerines from local trees.  It is a nice treat.  Higher than average temperatures bring pretty flowers on trees and shrubs.  Today’s high is predicted to be 85.

Major accomplishment this week! The deck, cockpit and cabin tops are painted.  We are going to need extra strong sun glasses. It is so bright and shiny.  Pictures do not do it justice.  Nonskid areas made nonskid again.  Hardware is being re-bedded.  We take our shoes off at the bottom of the ladder to try to keep things clean.  When I removed the tape yesterday, we discovered that we have a little more touch up work to do than we thought. Oh well, add a little paint here and remove a little there.

The first day of painting went without a hitch, but Tuesday was a little windy. As we were almost done, the wind picked up the paint tray and dumped down the new window and onto the deck and new toe rail. The interesting thing to me was that neither of us made a sound.  None. We just started mopping up paint. After the long silence, one of us might have said, "Can you get that glob right there?" At dinner that night, Reggie tipped his wine glass over. Now there are expletives! Guess we know what's important. We also spilled paint on Wednesday. Negotiating around shrouds, etc with open containers of paint isn't easy, even for someone who is nimble and at our ages we are not nimble.

The weekend was all about food.  On Friday afternoon, we needed to let paint dry so we could walk around to do the rest of the deck. We headed off with our shopping list. First we stopped at Monkey Fist in Green Cove Springs to pick up a few items and then on to Jacksonville to get new cockpit speakers at West Marine. We are not big users of cockpit speakers, but the old ones had died and were letting water into the boat.  The West Marine speakers were an exact fit replacement.

By then it was close to dinner time. We hadn't been to Maggiano's for years. Delicious food and tons of it. Saturday's dinner is in the bag.  Saturday morning the resort managers hosted another breakfast for everyone.

Reggie asserted that we were going to finish painting the deck today, which I doubted, so after a big, late breakfast, we hit the decks. The only break we took was to give the section we just finished a little time to set up. I was hot and thirsty and wanted something fizzy to drink. We went to a nearby convenience store. A lunch break for champions.

how do I rotate this picture here?

This week’s target project is painting the sides of the boat.  The old rub rails will be removed today and the prep work will begin.   Getting it done in a week will be challenging.  We are really looking forward to seeing her pretty again.  She looks pretty ratty now with peeling clearcoat and scratches and off color touchup paint.  In fact, nobody can see much but the hull at present.  The deck is 10 feet in the air so deck and interior work is hidden.