As you know I was released from my Covid Quarantine exactly a week ago. I have had access to WildChild for exactly 7 days now, and I have been very busy. With the help of my fabulous new crew, Alex, the two of us have been bustin our humps everyday in the brutal heat and daily rain showers to get WildChild ready to launch. Alex commented that it was a lot more work than he expected it to be, he makes me smile sometimes. He also said to me a few days ago… “I (Alex) might be a little tough… but you (Lexi) are a lot tough…”. That made me smile too, maybe I am a rather tough chic, maybe.
For those of you out there who are sailors and have owned boats before you know exactly how miserable this whole process can be. In the brutal heat down here it has been extra awful. If you remember the last blog I was extremely anxious about the crack in my keel. Well when I was finally allowed to go see for myself, I discovered, much to my relief, it was not a stress fracture (YAY). It seems that some boatyard worker must have smashed into my keel with like apiece of angle iron or something and hit the keel extremely hard. This was just a surface scratch… but it was hit hard enough for the foreign object to scratch a full 2mm into solid lead! I am not pleased they have abused my boat in my absence but I am also super happy my keel is not compromised. So ever the optimist this is perhaps a good thing.
Any boat that sits in any boatyard is in a state of continuous decay, boats need constant love care and attention and if you leave them for only a few months they decay surprisingly quickly. So when I first arrived to finally see my girl after all this time she looked kind of old, neglected and worn down. It broke my heart a little bit, I admit I cried a little.
I will say that when she was hauled out, WildChild’s bottom was in remarkably good shape for being continuously in the ocean for two years, I took great care of her and the Intra-lux XXX hard paint did very well. I always made the effort for the last two years to scrape and clean my hull whenever needed, so I had no serious barnacle blisters or difficult to remove foreign matter on the hull. Aside from small cracks in the paint when I returned, caused by the bottom drying out completely, which is normal, the rest was in good shape. One day scuffing off the old marine growth and we were good to begin the priming job (yellow paint above).
I cannot say the waterline was in very good condition though. When I bought WildChild she was a light weight race boat with a very shallow waterline. I knew that by turning her into a cruiser, adding so much extra stuff, I was going to have to bring the waterline up, so I did. Before I left Canada I raised her waterline 6 inches and made a lovely pink boot strip above. Well…. ummm… my bad…. I misunderstood how much extra weight a FULLY LOADED cruising sailboat is going to carry. Everyone said… “don’t worry about it… salt water is extra buoyant… it’ll be fine…” so umm… even taking that into account… I did not raise my waterline enough last time.
So with the actual level of the water on my hull the last two years being sometimes exactly at the tippy top of my bottom paint but more often than not the white gel-coat line was underwater. Bear in mind as well the water is seldom ever perfectly flat and calm. Then of course I did that 4 month stint in Luperon, where the water is so rich and alive with marine growth it was incredible. Even though I cleaned my hull every 4 weeks the growth was so severe that the roots of it actually began to dig their way into the white gel-coat stripe and blistered it up. Sometimes is looked as if my girl was wearing a grass skirt.
We had our work cut out for us. The good news is Captain Lexi is the girl who can fix or build almost anything and my skills were up to the task at hand. The two limiting factors I have had to contend with though, were limited time, and limited budget. My stupid Covid quarantine wasted two weeks of my life laying here idly and not being productive and subsequently limited my working time down to a bit over a week. The second limitation is of course money. I have no pension and nearly ZERO income and a rapidly dwindling small savings account. Covid is really robbing me fast. Antigua is also one of the most expensive Caribbean islands (tied only with Barbados). So everything here is about 3 times more expensive than it would be in Canada. In Canada I could buy a 5 pack of cheap paint brushes at the dollar store for about $1.50 cdn. Here it is 10e.c. ($5cdn) per brush, and these are not fancy brushes.
The next thing of course was bottom paint. It is always a good idea to keep using the same bottom paint to ensure good adhesion and compatibility, but of course I cannot get my bottom paint here. After some research I found out that actually, due to almost no environmental laws here at all, I could get a wonderful, highly toxic, bottom paint here called Seahawk Island 44 plus. You cannot buy this stuff in Canada or America, as it is too effective at deterring marine growth. From all my research it should be great paint and last a long time. You can even buy bottles of extra “biocide” to add into the paint to make it extra effective at deterring growth.
My big problem is… this place is extremely expensive. So each can of paint cost me $1500e.c. (about $600cdn or $500usd) and I needed 3 cans to do a great job and get three coats on. This was my biggest expense for sure. Here is to hoping it is very effective for years to come.
A hull never seems so big as when you have to clean scrape sand and paint it. The scuffing only took the two of us half a day, Alex hated doing it but was very helpful anyway. You can see we ran out of primer for the last bit of the bow. The can of primer we bought, at very high local prices, was expired two years ago so the bottom 2 inches of the can had already cooked off and hardened. When I returned to the Budget marine the next day and explained the situation to them, hoping to at least get a discount on the next can, they amazingly GAVE me a free second can and apologized for the inconvenience. That was very nice of them.
Another project I wanted to get done was to reinforce the prop strut. One of the down sides to having a lovely $2500 all brass (or maybe bronze) two blade folding prop without teeth is that sometimes only one blade pops open and the other doesn’t. This causes a severe off balance wobbling that just puts a lot of stress on the prop strut. I had noticed over time, diving the keel, that there were cracks forming over the prop strut plate.
Lexi no likey cracks in her girl.
WildChild is built like a tank and I like it that way, any and all weaknesses need to be addressed. So I ground the area down to expose the plate and discovered that the original installation used a wooden shim between the fiberglass and the strut mount that was then covered in a thick layer of marine filler. The strut itself is not loose now and not actually damaged but water had penetrated the cracked filler and got at the wooden shim underneath.
BIGGER BETTER MORE POWER
So of course Captain Lexi fiber-glassed the whole thing in with half an inch of glass and kevlar to make it bullet proof. That strut ain’t never gonna come off now.
Then of course as a part of routine maintenance we always have to change out our zincs. I had designed WildChild with a little extra electrical lovin, and to prevent any chance of my thru hulls corroding or failing due to stray current in the grounding system, the seacocks are all electrically isolated from the electrical system and independently grounded with this dedicated zinc plate. My system has clearly been working great as my seacocks still look like new. You can see the old zinc took ALL the corrosion damage and protected my seacocks perfectly. With Alex’s help we got this changed in half a day.
Another thing I had never thought about before… was anti-fouling my prop and prop shaft. At first this seems like a crazy idea, after all they are working high speed metal parts. After two years though of diving and cleaning my hull and seeing exactly how bad and how thick the marine life builds up on these things I decided to try to do something about it. I found a three part epoxy type compound in the budget marine and decided to give it a try. It is an ugly gold color which I think looks terrible, but if its effective… who cares what color it is. Also you can see the new zinc installed here too.
Interesting side story about a local guy
As for the dark blue of the hull, it clearly needed some cleaning and waxing and shinning up and lovin too… but we were very busy… so I subcontracted it to a local yard worker named Wayne. My crew Alex is a lovely human being but we do need to understand he is here voluntarily and is not getting paid. So any help he is willing to give me I am very grateful for. Cleaning and waxing the hull is straight grunt work and any monkey could do it but I did not want to put it all on to Alex. So when Wayne approached me in the first day and offered to do the work “for a good price” I relented and sub contracted this part out. Alex and I had to hurry to do the important stuff and the shinny-ness of the hull was pretty low on my priority list.
Now Wayne… Wayne is a character. I will say an interesting character.
At first he seems like a nice local boatyard worker guy and he is always smiling and being friendly with me. Everything seems fine at first. Every time my crew leaves though, and I am alone in the yard with Wayne, he stops what he is doing to come talk to me. Okay… I get it… I am the pretty young rich white girl in his illusion of reality and he wants to see if he can snag himself some white tail. Getting hit on is not a new thing for me to endure. I stay polite and keep my physical distance from him every time he approaches me.
Wayne is always working an angle with me and always moving the conversation to how beautiful my eyes are or how sexy I look. He askes how old I am (very rude) and if I am single (ok) and why don’t I have any babies yet (none of his business). I stay polite and tap dance gently around these constant subjects and just wish he would go away. He makes me feel very uncomfortable and I always wish Alex would hurry back.
It was about ten minutes after the above picture was taken that Wayne is telling me all about his life’s story when he says “…. after I got out of jail…“. Ummm… what..? My ears perk up and I am paying attention now. I start probing for more details. Well it seems he was in jail for rape… yep… he’s a rapist… and he freely and openly tells me this. Oh LORD… I am alone with a predator who wants a piece of me. I get even more uncomfortable.
Wayne says many things over the next two days. Things like;
“…. I punched her in the face because she needed to calm down….”
“…I hit her because she wasn’t doing what she was told…”
“… she hit me so I hit her back… she shouldn’t act like that if she don’t wanna gets hit…”
Oh lord this guy is not right in the head, and that’s the most dangerous kind. Wayne laughs to himself a lot, and talks to himself a lot. Wayne is also a man with some very old and primitive ideas of what the idea of “woman” means. Like women should be cleaning and cooking and doing what the man tells her to do. That men are the boss, the leader, and women are supposed to submit and do what they are told.
He also once said to me… “… you wanna be a man… like the girl I’m with now… she always wants to be a man too… always tryin to be in charge like a man… “.
….ummmm…. oh crap this is bad… this guy is not safe for me to be around alone with.
Wayne sees me as a woman… therefore I need his (male) help. So he is going to be nice and help me. He is constantly telling me what to do. I am just baffled. He is constantly telling me what I should be doing with my boat and constantly telling me when I am not doing it “the right way” and he tells me what to do. Of course…. ummm… its my fucking boat… I am the captain of this boat and I can do what ever I fucking want to do with my own boat! I am always gentle calm and polite with him but his constant insisting and telling me what to do is getting on my nerves. Each time I gently refuse him and explain “… if its okay with you Wayne… I know what I am doing and I am going to do it my way…. if you don’t mind…“.
Eventually he comes right out and says to me…
“…. you keep refusing me… and I don’t like it when a woman refuses me… ” and he is getting an aggressive edge to his voice, he is getting angry. Alex was gone for lunch and I pray for his speedy return. I look around the boat yard for witnesses and there is nobody else around. I am alone with the predator and there are no witnesses. I pacify him and slowly move myself around to work on the other side of my boat. It was really uncomfortable stuff for me. Wayne is completely fine around other men but his sexist ideas are dangerous for women.
I will say he did a nice job shinning up WildChild’s hull for me. When he wasn’t hitting on me he did do good work on the hull. So that’s something positive to say.
It does rain here a lot this time of year. It rains like everyday and often several times a day. Generally no big deal if you are just having a lovely day, but it is super terrible if you are trying to apply fresh paint to your hull. Every time a short rain shower breaks out, and sometimes strong little things, we run for shelter under nearby boats.
Alex is a well trained Canadian boy, and he insists on full proper PPE when working. I bought him a bunny suit and dug out my full respirator for him. He seems weirdly sensitive to the smell of paint and paint fumes. He was a professional painter back in Canada so his painting skills are up, good for me. I think it is way too hot here to be wearing a bunny suit but I respect Alex’s right to protect his body from harm anyway he feels comfortable with.
It took some time but eventually we worked hard and made progress on WildChild. We got the blisters all removed from the waterline and brought the bottom paint up to the new higher level. We taped off my lines when we needed to and began applying the pretty pink gel-coat boot stripe above the new waterline two days ago. I went with a darker, more bubble gum type pink this time. The last one really sun faded.
Oh I also had to grind down and fiberglass the bow. I had damage on the bow right near the waterline from a year ago when my anchor fell in the thorny path and pounded the crap out of my hull. I love my Rockna anchor but oh goodness it has a sharp tip on it that just gouged out big chunks from my bow that needed glassing back in for protection.
I am not sure if you have ever worked with Gel-coat polyester paint before… but it really really hates water. Unfortunately for me, it rains here everyday and multiple times a day. Several times while applying my pretty custom blended pink boot stripe it rained in the middle of my painting job. Once you put your catalyst in the paint the clock is ticking, stop painting and you lose the pot and the cup and the brush. I was trying to paint using a hot mix (lotsa catalyst) so it would hopefully set before the next rain but several times it rained in the middle of my paint job with fresh paint on the hull…. Grrrrr… to mother for her bad timing… This has given me some problems, when we went to do the final sanding today of the boot stripe, it was a tiny bit gummy still, and the sand paper kept gumming up.
So if you ever do meet me out here… please admire my pretty pink boot stripe from 20 feet away or more, no close inspections please. 🙂
I know that I have cut corners getting this work done as fast as possible, and I think we have done very well getting so much work done in such a short time. I have properly filled in and protected with multiple layers all the old blisters on the old waterline. It is well protected, but it is not perfectly smooth though. To fill it all in properly it would have taken about ten layers and ten sanding’s and eleven days to do it perfectly. The waterline is water tight again and well protected… but upon close inspection you can see the imperfections of my corner cutting.
Hopefully I can be forgiven
We started on the bright work inside yesterday but it still wasn’t completely set by today. Everything is all shiny inside and although not new looking by any means, it is reasonably clean in there and livable. I wanted to get down there to start doing other work today but decided to call it quits a bit early today and give the varathane another 24 hours to set properly.
Tomorrow is Sunday and around here everything is closed including the boat yard. I think I am going to work on upholstering my cockpit cushion tomorrow and maybe rest a bit.
Originally my launch was scheduled for Wednesday Nov 25th… but the yard asked me if we could move it to Thursday Nov 26th… they will be moving the boat beside me that morning which will make it easier to get at WildChild for her launch. They were also nice enough to give me the 1:30pm slot. This way they can lift me into the slings before lunch, giving me time to get my pad marks and bottom of the keel painted, then launch me after lunch.
WildChild will be floating again by Thursday…. YAY YAY YAY…!!!!
Next to finish all the little projects, get the engine running again and the water maker (fingers crossed) and service all the winches.
Then we begin Alex’s sailing lessons and training and WildChild is free to roam again.
Cheers Sailors
Captain Lexi….
…………… the hot sweaty sore and tired sailor girl this week……