More preparations, part 12: we made aluminum rope hangers for the head. I poked the holes with my jeweler’s flex shaft. We also put some of these hangers in the amas. I look seriously hot in goggles and ear protection.

Here’s another photo of Joshua and I out the other day on the bay.

An amusing story about Joshua the other day: he was in Safeway picking up some ice when the guy in line behind him started freaking out asking if he was George Michael (who must be what, 50?). Joshua wasn’t entirely sure if he was joking; the guy’s friend clearly wasn’t sure and kept asking Joshua on the side if he really WAS George Michael.

1. A first aid kit has been assembled and neatly boxed up in appropriate white “waterproof” bins and cute mesh bags containing such item groups as “Dental” and “Clean-up” (that’s the betadine, et al.) and “Holy Shit Gaping Wound Closure” have been geniusly crafted on this little beauty.

Mom will donate left-over and hopefully not too expired Vicodins for emergencies (what are moms for?) and we found a willing doctor to write the rest of the heavy med scripts! We are so set.

Behold the First Aid Bins:

2. Also sewn on the wee petite antique machine were these Net Things that cover the, uh, Cubby Things on the boat so that the contents don’t go flying across the cabin when we bump into the big water. The downside to this improvement is that Joshua and I will no longer be able to play the “What Went Crash” game. We’ll get over it.

3. OH, and new sparkling clean dry cushions for the forward bunks have been made using rejected (i.e., free! Thanks Bill!!!) closed-cell foam pieces from CCushions. I did not sew these on the wee machine but on the burly Sailrite machine. That lovely color is “China Blue,” in case you were wondering. You may pronounce this with a Texas accent.

4. Provisioning! I have successfully purchased toiletries and spices. I had to go to probably 5 different stores to get it all too. If the food-buying part takes me nearly as long as buying our shampoo, we might get out of here by spring 2006.

5. Lastly, Joshua and I continue to improve our vocabulary by watching movies in Spanish.
* Pincho perro (Thanks! Amores Perros)
* Puta madre, hijo de puta, puta mierda (courtesy of Motorcycle Diaries)

Joshua gets a wild hair on Saturday to “let’s just unscrew the dropboard track and see how bad the decomposition is behind it.” Then, before consulting me, Joshua mixes up some clear penetrating epoxy (more than he needs because you never know) and begins happily painting away at the minor (minor!) little scricks in the edges where the tracks were. Then he’s got all this epoxy to give away and before I know what the hell is going on, has touched up all sorts of minor scrapes and dings and cracks and what-have-you all over the cockpit AND the interior right over the settee. And, when this particular brand of epoxy cures, it turns an icky yellow and just gets even yellowier with time and air. We leave the boat and return Sunday: about 100 different wee spots all over the cockpit are a dripping sickly neon yellow and, christ, it’s cold so the epoxy is taking a long time to get to the point where you can sand it. We did thankfully get other non-epoxied parts sanded because at this point it was obvious that the entire cockpit must now be painted or else I’d poke my eyes out having to look at all the blemishes.

So I’m at the boat Monday: still a wee tad tacky; oh bummer I’ll have to wait until tomorrow. No, BAD me, I’ll tape off so I’ll have fewer things to do tomorrow (sort of good me). Tuesday: SHIT. Have to sand this crap and paint it dammit. Sigh. Big growl. First I eat some salted cashews with Rooster sauce on them to get my strength up for the big task ahead of me (yum). Then I proceed to sand my fingernails to the quick with the other side of my folded-up nib of sandpaper (epoxy being far, far tougher than fingernails) because our cockpit has all sorts of uncomfortable angles with tight corners that a stupid electrical orbital sander just does not reach. (Ow.) In the end I managed to get a mild scrape on the epoxy in the corners and the gross spots on the broad open spaces sanded flat. The cockpit looks absolutely atrocious at this point and I’m sort of despairing. Plus the wind has cooked up a bit—for those of you unfamiliar with Coyote Point, the place gets regularly FUCKING WINDY AS SHIT and I’m not kidding. I try to decide if I should wait until tomorrow, you know, when the wind maybe dies down, but then I’ll just have to do it tomorrow, and I know the wind won’t die down until winter. I prep the paint and rig a shade structure so I don’t fry my skinny parts in the sun while otherwise preoccupied. I turn on the radio and set the volume to be heard from the cockpit and get ready for some Terry Gross. She was supposed to interview some New York Times dude about the Hurricane but unfortunately the Judge Roberts stuff is on. Oh well, maybe it’s almost over.

My shade structure is completely feeble in the face of the ferocious wind. I didn’t see this on the weather site this morning; it only said “foggy,” and it’s not anywhere near foggy so there you go. I still have to tape down the paint splatter guard over the companionways, and not having any special paint-blocking tools I scavenge one of Joe’s (the guy who we bought the boat from) old plastic bags holding some random stuff we never really looked at too closely and tape it to one companionway. Tape is not sticking (plastic bag is half decayed) and the stuff is going all over the place in the evil wind. After much grumbling and half-assed searching, I find a squashed box of garbage bags (with one left) and an old Safeway grocery bag to cut up for the remaining companionway and cockpit floor. I have just enough blue tape to tape down the fluttery bits of the floor: miracles never cease. Feinstein is now harassing Roberts about women’s issues. Seems he wrote down some neanderthal remarks about equality and the sexes during the Reagan era. Roberts dodges the question with a completely nonsensical bit about lawyer jokes.

I begin to paint the cockpit. It is SO fun I can’t even tell you. Actually, after painting all of the irritating bits that can’t be had by the foam mini-roller, and actually getting down the to nitty gritty of foam rolling, I see how amazingly fantastic the cockpit looks after only one coat of paint. I’m feeling better. It’s now 3pm and there is no hope of Terry Gross coming on. The Roberts love fest is getting nauseating at this point: “To your knowledge, is the line that you have attempted to walk in these proceedings about being as forthcoming as you can, but recognizing that you have a responsibility not to jeopardize your impartiality, either the perception or the reality or the impartiality and independence of the judiciary…?” sez Cornyn; “It IS, senator…” gag gag gag.

Wind is calming down. One coat is down and I have some Tasty Bite for lunch. The hearing is degenerating to this: “the American people want to know…” and oh god the sports analogies: “…yesterday we were talking about baseball, but today we’re talking about dodgeball…” Then there was a bunch of this: “Well, that is in an area where I think I should not respond because…” “I’m not going to comment.” “I can’t elaborate on—can’t elaborate on what’s—beyond what’s in the memo.”

One of these: “He’s filibustering, Senator.” Haw. Haw. Haw.

And then this crazy dude named Graham who I thought was something NPR threw in as comic relief.

GRAHAM: Let’s talk about rightin’ wrongs here. I think it STINKS that somebody can burn the flag and that’s called speech. What do you think about THAT?
[All this in a thick South Carolina accent. Did I forget to mention that?]
R: Well… We had the Flag Protection Act after the Supreme Court concluded that it was protected speech…
G: Show me where the term symbolic speech is in the Constitution.
R: Well, it’s not.
G: It’s NOT. They just MADE it up, didn’t they? And I think it STINKS that a kid that can’t go to school and say a prayer if he wants to voluntarily.
What. Do. You. Think. About. THAT?
R: That’s something that’s probably inappropriate for me to comment on.
…
G: I think it’s not right for elected officials to be unable to talk about or protect the unborn. What do you think about THAT?

Oh jeez and the guy went ON. Roberts at this point was exercising the ol’ Ginsburg maneuver—waiving it around like a flag to deflect all those messy opinion questions. The wind was finally dying down and it was warming up a bit.

Sigh. Second coat = on. 6pm: time to pick up Joshua and get stuff to make dinner. I leave about a zillion things lying around in my haste to be gone because crawling through the top of the companionways without touching any paint is uncomfortable and nearly impossible and I just prefer to let all my tools rust. Plus Joshua thinks we’ll be back over to empty the head so I can get them, that’s right, later.

Oh but the cockpit looks good. I guess it was worth it.

Joshua definitely thinks it was worth it.

We tend to be do-it-yourselfers way beyond the point where it gets stupid. For example, spending 30 hours researching rope prices on the internet in an attempt to save $13, then taking over six months to purchase it anyway because we got so discouraged during the research process. We therefore happily justified purchasing a $500 sewing machine that will sew through 14 inches of solid concrete (for breakfast) in order to make our own trampolines (among other things).

In order to SAVE SAVE SAVE, we spent around 312 hours researching and agonizing over the various trampoline materials available out in the wide world, 678 hours trying to decide if we needed stainless grommets or just nickel-plated brass ones and where can we find the best deal on them. Another 820 hours, give or take 3 hours or so, were spent figuring out what rope was best, how to tie it off, how much was needed (depended upon how we were going to tie it off), what sort of trampoline edging material we wanted to use, and what sort of thread we needed to buy (this easily took up half of that 820 hours).

Here’s the list of materials used to make the trampolines:
– 6.5 yards 29-oz Trampoline Mesh, $39/yard
– 4 yards Shelter-Rite, $13.75/yard
– 250 feet dacron 3-strand line, 1/4 inch, $0.27/foot
– billion, I mean 200, #4 nickel-plated bronze spur grommets, $0.28 each
– 1 spool Profilin thread, $59

Total: $437.45
This total includes about a 10% discount for ordering all at once and asking nicely, but does not include shipping which was about $60. Gasp. The mesh is heavy. For comparison, we got a professional quote from multihullnets.com that came out to about $1500.

List of specialty tools needed:
– Sewing machine. Sailrite LSZ-1 with the large balance wheel. I don’t remember exactly what we paid for it, but we got a good deal on the demo machine at the Oakland boat show a couple of years ago. ~$600
– #4 Hole Cutter, $15.75
– #4 Die set for the grommets, $21.00
– Many instances of the F-word. Free!

Most of these things we got from Sailrite which is a good DIY resource. Some things can be found cheaper, but probably not after you count the extra shipping cost. We have a bunch of thread left over, but little else. The hole punch is on the small side to give a tight fit to the grommets. This was a bit of a problem when going through this many layers and it helped to ream out the holes first using a very expensive specialty tool (an old pair of pliers).

The reasons we decided upon this mesh over all other meshes out there were 1) we didn’t want the mesh to stretch out, 2) it had to be coated with vinyl in order to be UV/weather protected, 3) we wanted somewhat larger holes in order for water and air to go through (don’t need to be going airborne in a gust), 4) we wanted it to be sturdy so we wouldn’t have to worry about it chucking our anchor on it, and 5) we didn’t want black.

Edging was purchased to match and because it seemed pretty much bullet-proof. The thread situation was a toughie; the dilemma is that if you do not use UV-protected thread, it will break down in as little as a year and you have to re-sew your trampolines. This sounded like a pain in the ass and we hadn’t even tried to sew the anything yet (we are very glad we bought the fancy thread, I’ll just say that now). Unfortunately, the normal tough thread (non UV) is very cheap, whereas the fancy stuff, “Tenara,” runs $150/spool. We finally found out that they had a competitor with far better prices (and smaller spools) and bought Profilin thread, also UV and weather resistant. Nickel grommets because we were so worn down with all the other decisions that we didn’t really care anymore.

The method:

We were lucky in that exactly half the width the trampoline mesh came in was perfect for one side; we just measured and mapped out the widths and curves for one side and checked the other side for accuracy (in case it was not an exact mirror image, which it should be, which it was, thank god), then started cutting. We decided two inches was sufficient edging width (we decided this before purchasing the material, actually, because we’re geniuses) and that a raw edge would be unsightly; therefore, we folded two inches under, thus cutting our edging strips eight inches wide. Then we sewed it together; this went fairly well, some swearing was involved but most of the pain was in setting it up (getting the Shelter-Rite folded and attached in the right place to the tramp material). Get a bunch of little clamps at your dollar store, they’re very handy.

We brought the shiny new trampolines to the boat to be sure they fit (oh yes they did). Then we marked where to put the grommets. We decided upon the simplest tying method, which placed each grommet halfway between each pair of eye straps on the boat. Then Joshua pounded for a long long time. After that he pounded some more. Then he did the other side. Tying the trampolines onto the boat was a superfantastic pain in the ass and convinced me beyond doubt that the UV resistant thread was a good idea.

Here are the pictures of them on the boat; we left the ends of the ropes temporarily tied so we can allow the rope to stretch before tying it off more permanently. Actually, it really hasn’t seemed to stretch all that much and we can probably officially tie them off at any time.

Note that the outside edge against the ama is tied closer than the inside—this is because of the walkways that run along the sides of the main hull.

Looking forward up under the aca.

Close-up of the top lashes of the ama and the underside, against the hull.

Here is a photo of what the original rope lashings looked like. This system was inexpensive and provided safety, but those holes were big enough to stick a leg through.

We are so not motoring here :)