Thursday, January 7, 2010
Today started off slowly, particularly as the sky is overcast and occasional lazy raindrops are falling from the stratus cloud layer. I think I should take this opportunity to get the inside preparatory work on the boat done so that I can enjoy another day or two of nice sailing before flying home.
I did the final load of laundry, got all of my clothing and bedclothes into the space bags and vacuumed them out, unfortunately all of the bag have some sort of small leaks somewhere so they slowly expanded again but at least they will be relatively airtight and hopefully keep the boat smell out of the clothing for my next trip back.
The whole transom on the Lodestar dinghy had ripped off and I had lifted the engine aboard Zanshin I in order not to have it rip off the dinghy and disappear into the depths; I found some adhesive and reattached the wooden transom to the PVC or Hypalon of the dinghy, but after it had dried for a couple of hours it still didn’t seem to adhere, so I fear that I used the wrong type of glue and I’ll have to repeat the exercise when I return to the boat (I think I used normal PVC glue and that my dinghy material is Hypalon, which requires a different 2-component glue).
After a full day of bumming around the boat and repairing minor things I had a great steak dinner upstairs at Leverick Bay and went back aboard the boat. By this time it was 9pm and the wind had picked up significantly and somehow very big waves were making it past the reef and forcing the boats at the dock to rock and roll heavily. I took out more dock lines and tried to get Zanshin I off the docks but the angles that I had to work with weren’t sufficient. I put out all my fenders but I was still being forced against the dock. The medium sized powerboats were in very bad shape, some of them actually hopping over the levels of the docks on occasion. Even the big and heavy boats (Chanticleer and the refurbished erstwhile Norwegian lighthouse tender whose name escapes me) were bouncing about. I would get up every hour or so during the night and check the fenders and the lines and didn’t get much sleep at all.
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