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 …