Time Flies When your Having Fun!

Fast forward to October- so busy working on Luna Sole that I did not take time to blog until now. Progress on her is.....going. We were not ready to launch by the end of August, so we decided to save the launch chips, use them for a new holding tank and keep working. Some wonderful new friends and the marina took pity on us and would ask us to go sailing with them (Buffett got to come too!). From time to time, we took them up on the offer!
To update our work...I continued (and still am) working on the teak. I have re-finished from bare wood everything on the boat at this point except the taft rail, eyebrows, doors & hand rails. We are planning to remove all those pieces to make some repairs to leaks and cracked wood so they are a winter garage project. I removed the traveller and taft rail last weekend- why does something that should take an hour take 2 days in boat land and who knew I could actually fit in down inside both lazarettes?
Tom decided to remove the "zinc" from the outside of the hull a few months ago to replace it. When he took it off, water poured out from the keel. hum...thinking that's not supposed to happen. Sigh..here we go again. So, he drilled a bunch more holes to let everything drain, then "hooked her up to life support" with hoses all over and a shop vac. After hours spent online and with the Bayfield owners group, we determined that 1) the water probably came from our interior hose cleaning efforts (opps) and cracks in the bilge and 2) that the "zinc" was actually at one time a lightening system that had a long piece of copper or bronze on it. Opps again... We decided to work on fixing the bilge cracks first so that no future water can get down into our soon-to-be dry keel. Then, after sitting this winter with a vacum pump on her, we will seal up the outside holes and re-install the proper plates for the lightning system next spring before launch.
It took multiple weekends to get all the hardware re-installed back up on the new bow sprit. Just last weekend Tom was installing the anchor rollers. (Note: he is a messy one with the goopy, sticky white marine glue stuff (my technical name for 3M stuff) and needs constant supervision).
We, sadly, removed the sails from Luna at the beginning of October- she won't need them this year and found that the furlers were jammed- yet another boat piece in our garage that needs servicing- what a surprise!
We are going down again this weekend and for as long as we can work. The new launch date? May 1- on or before!

July- the work contines as the heat builds!

Well, the good news is that the smell that had previously plagued Luna is gone. The bad news is, the more we look the more it costs. July 2010 will be know as the $5000 month. While scraping Luna's lovely teak bow sprit for re-varnishing, we discovered that it had rotted straight through from the deck to the sprit! Who knew teak could rot? So, we found Earl Matheson, a local carpenter in Rock Hall, who assured us that he could make us a new one....and he did. It took a few weeks, but the new deck and sprit is mounted back up on its perch. We had to take the trail boards off in order to re-bolt the sprit properly so they are in the process of being put back on this weekend. More pics on that to come.

While removing the sprit, we had a local fiberglass man (Mark Reuwer) come and look at something that "didn't look quite right" $2000 later, that got fixed also. One of the previous owners had moved the innerstay 2' forward to the bow of the boat. Sounds good from a tacking standpoint, but he never reinforced the fiberglass and it started to pull the boat apart. Fortunately, that's all fixed now, but it was quite a distraction from our normal work, and our bank account for the month.

Meanwhile, inside the boat, our hole still continues to gap at us every weekend. It's been brutally hot (over 100 degrees) this summer which makes it impossible to work with fiberglass expoy and also challenging to think! What started as a 2-4 weekend project is taking all summer. Our best hope is to have her in the water by September. Sigh.... oh well. She'll be great when she's done. (repeat 10 times each day..)

Our one saving grace this past weekend however, came at the hands of a wonderful new friend. "Rob", the polite southern guy with the Cabo Rico 42, invited us out on a "night sail" on Saturday night. We left under a full moon, clear sky and steady breeze at 8:45 pm and didn't come back into the dock until 1:45 am! It was an amazing trip filled with peace, relaxation, wonderful conversation and new friends. Helped to remind Tom and I why we are doing all this.

Remembering the small things is sometimes the greatest joy.

Month 1 as Sailboat Owners

Well, it's been a little over a month and the glow of boat ownership is still there. So to though are the aching muscles! At this point, Luna Sole is up on the hard eagerly awaiting her next splash (as are her owners!). I have been working on re-doing the teak on the rub rails, trail boards, and bow sprit. It's time consuming work of heating the old varnish and scraping it section by section but there is something about seeing the warm teak beneith all that goop that makes me smile. I'm about 75% there and hope to finish those sections this weekend. Tom has been working on a more smelly problem. We found that the holding tank (original to the boat) was cracked. So, he removed that and we started scrubbing away years of "poo"- yuck! Not a job for the faint of nose let me tell ya! Then, we discovered there was a leak in the pump-out so some of the poo has also made it way behind the molded fiberglass in the head. After several weekends of scrubbing and opening more cans of worms, Tom has cut out a section of the head floor and the sole outside the head. Now the real scrubbing can begin. He was watching the DVD of "how to do fiberglass repair" work last night. This should be interesting to watch.
Our hope is that soon, there will be no smell and we can move on to the other things on the survey list that require immediate attention before we launch. We were optimistic for July 4th but it looks like it may be a few more weeks after that until it really happens.
Until that time, we work all day, make sure to never miss sunset and toast the adventure each evening with a sundowner! Cheers!

In the beginning....

In August of 2009, Tom (husband) came home from yet another day of working for someone else and feeling minimal satisfaction. He said to Cheryl (wife) and Buffett (Golden Retriever Dog) "What do you think about buying a sailboat, selling everything and sailing around the world". After I checked Tom's head, to make sure he wasn't bleeding somewhere from the knock he must have received, I uttered one word. "Now?" Thus, our journey began
We are both dreamers, both have "corporate jobs", both long to spend more time living, less time working. Tom is the researcher of the family. I'm the person who figures out how to pay for all these dreams. Buffett hangs out and waits for the fun to begin on her next adventure. After reading dozens of books, attending the in-water boat show in Annapolis (which quickly showed us what we COULD NOT afford) and a driving around on a snowy January day in Rock Hall, Md., we have begun to make the dream a reality. As of March 5, 2010, we now own 2.5 acres in the quiet little town of Rock Hall. Someday there will be a small home on that land where we will spend our 3-4 months in port when we are not cruising. Right now, it's just a flat piece of land- but it's beautiful and it's ours! Especially now that our friend gave us a gift and planted our first two trees: Red Oak and Copper Beech.

On April 17, 2010 we bought our sailboat; a Bayfield 32. She's in amazing condition and quite a beauty. She is modern enough for comfort, but traditional enough to conjur memories of days gone by when boat builders put heart and soul into a vessel. Her home is at an amazing marina- The Sailing Emporium. We slept on her last Saturday night for the first time. Like everything else with this adventure, it felt right! Next steps: Complete CGA "Sailing Skills & Seamanship" class, name boat, paint, sand, varnish & clean boat.

Learn to sail- did I mention that we don't know how?

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do, than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade windsw in your sails. Explore...Dream...Discover" Mark Twain