Stranded at the edge of the world

This is called a “keel smile”. Pretty cruel name if you ask me.

“It always takes longer than you think. It always costs more than you think.”

                                                                                                       – Bob Vila

We hauled Serenity out of the water in Ilwaco, WA on the edge of the Columbia River and the Pacific to put on a new coat of paint (covering all of our “lessons” over the years) and install a depth sounder, among a few other small tasks. It’s been over two weeks now that we’ve been here, up on the hard, facing danger with each new morning. It’s not our lives that have been in danger, but our dream.

On the first day of the haulout, we discovered that our keel had a small crack where it met the underside of our hull. This apparently is a fairly common occurrence on fin keeled boats (as opposed to full keel, for the uninitiated), and on a more common fiberglass-cored boat it wouldn’t be that big a deal. On our boat however, which is essentially a wood boat with a fiberglass skin, this crack spent let water through that protective skin and into the hull. This is bad.

So with the help of my folks, we ground back the entire area and set it up to dry with assistance from a shop vac, some visqueen, and a lot of duct tape. There has been no end of boatyard weirdos, experts, and passersby offering their advice.

Not pictured: Jeff standing back watching and looking grave. Mom at the ready.

After about a week of drying, we recruited our yard neighbor (a bona-fide expert) to help us re-glass the keel with eight layers of new fiberglass, and I’m happy to report that the keel is probably stronger than it has ever been.

It doesn’t end here.

Upon cutting out an old thru-hull to replace it, Harmony called down that she’d found a small spot of rot in the hull right around one side of the old fitting. No problem, I responded, just dig out the bad part and we can refill it with goop. Famous last words.

The bow stem after Harmony “dug out the bad part”.

About two hours later, Harmony had peeled back nearly the entire inside of our bow to discover that our bow stem was rotted clear through. The bow stem is a big hunk of tree that runs from the bottom to the top of our nose, and which takes the brunt of big waves and other forces. Not only that, the rot had spread from the stem into the adjoining cedar strip hull, in some places up to three feet back. This is very bad. This is trip killing bad.

Fortunately, once again there was no shortage of helpful expertise hanging around the boat yard. We returned to Robert, the neighbor who has been reparing boats and doing fiberglass for over 30 years, and he showed us a clearish path out. All we needed to do was saturate the area with a magic substance called “Git Rot” and it would harden up stronger than wood. So simple! We spent a day and a few hundred dollars pouring the Git Rot into holes I’d drilled, and we waited. Two days later as I poked my finger into the spongy – but now nice and shiny – wood, we concluded that it hadn’t worked. On to Plan B, which has entailed digging out all the rotten wood and creating a new bow stem out of wood, then glassing it in. The process is still ongoing.

We did end up getting the depth sound installed and the new coat of paint put on though. It turns out Harmony is a gifted painter, and our hull looked smooth and red like a cherry tomato. Then Robert suggested that the boat would be much stronger if we put some extra fiberglass reinforcement around the nose, so my poor Harmony had to take a heavy sander to her just-finished paint job. As of now, Serenity’s nose job is 2/3rds finished, and the new stem is half done.

Harmony spent three days painting the new red on the hull, only to sand it off again. There’s a moral in here somewhere, maybe a homily. I don’t actually know what a homily is. The first part of Serenity’s new nose job. Once this is done and stiffened up, we’ll be tough enough to go looking for trouble. The Doctors, our crewmates from the ill-fated first Pacific trip. If they only knew then what we know now. Sorry, Kate and Mariana for endangering  your husbands. A lot.

The craziest part of all of this is that with every new problem, Harmony and I are brought back to the time we sailed Serenity from Seattle to Portland and got caught in a 40-knot storm. We were surfing down 7 foot waves, taking extreme forces on our rigging and hull, not to mention the expert but forceful towing back up those same waves that we got from the Coast Guard hours later. We think back to this time and we wonder how the boat didn’t break apart around us. We think back to this time and wonder if the problems we’ve uncovered are really all as bad as we’ve been inclined to believe.

Boatyard chic.

I know this: I want my money back from the marine survey we had when we first bought this boat.

So here we are, still in Ilwaco.

Living on the boat, high on stilts.

Working until dark.

Surrounded by mess.

Sleeping on the fold-out couch.

Burning money as fast as money actually burns.

Occasionally eating $12 frozen burgers from the Sea Hag.

Enduring conversation with drunk old fishermen.

Covering ourselves in itchy dust.

Breathing toxic solvents all night.

Leaving not one knuckle on our hands intact.

Still destroying a little more than we construct.

Laughing about all the “critical” summer boat  projects like spice racks, radios, cushions and      lights.

Every afternoon toward evening, I walk out to the end of the boat launch and watch the line of breakers where the ocean beckons, right out there beyond reach.

We’ll get there, maybe even as early as this week. That is, if we stop looking for new problems.

Tack inspecting the plumbing. The daily dose of cute has been very necessary, but his marine survey skills are lacking.

Oh, and my phone died again. I think it’s kaputzky for real this time. C’est la vie.