A Taste of What's to Come

We spent most of our day in town trying to cram as many things as possible into our time allotted with the car. Including an unexpected and leisurely stop for a sit down lunch on the waterfront. Nice, despite the time it took. The morning also included paying a parking ticket. The traffic police are sneaky around here. They go around taking photos of cars parked illegally and then mail you the fine, no ticket on the window here. And the frustrating part is that the parking is so darn confusing and we never know what is ok and what isn’t. It seems like there are only traffic laws when we as foreign drivers do something somebody doesn’t like. Otherwise, it’s a free-for-all. The day we got the ticket (well, we were the ones with the car checked out at the time so it must have been us) we saw the cops, so Mike jumped in the car and moved it. I guess a little too late though.
The most exciting part of the day was buying a used wind generator from another cruiser and it should be a good addition to the solar panels we are still waiting for. We also put our companion way ladder back since we finished the varnishing. This is a good thing because last night I cut open my toe on the metal inverter while ‘jumping’ (or maybe falling is a better word) inside the cabin.
In the evening, we were invited by Bunny and Bill to their yacht ‘Onset’ for drinks (sounds pretty posh, huh?!). They were kind enough to invite us and some other folks who are hauled out and slaving away to come and enjoy the good life of a boat in the water for awhile. It was a really enjoyable evening and felt like a treat to sip on a gin and tonic and get to know some other people. I found myself feeling like I could sit there all night just chatting and picking everyone’s brains on places to visit in the Med. And it was so nice to sit on a boat that actually rocked with the water!

Food Coma Strikes Again

For a Sunday, a lot of work got done. Mike was busy at it all day and I was doing jobs here and there. But to honor the day, we headed to the bar around 5 o’clock, just in time to order a cheeseburger. Then walked to the floating dock where we were lured in by their big lounge pillows. Again, for the second day in a row Mike succumbed to food coma from a large meal and a couple of beers.

Food Coma

My craving for comfort food resulted in the end of our work for the day. As I was trying to decide what sounded good to eat, nachos came to mind and Mike put me on a mission. To my surprise, they actually ended up pretty good despite being forced to use Doritos. And the beers along with it at 3 in the afternoon went down pretty easy as well. So well in fact, that we strayed from our usual one beer quota and had a second. That’s all she wrote. As you can see from the picture, Mike was sent into a food and beer coma, barely to arouse the rest of the day.

Serena Misses Her Bathroom Because...

She doesn’t have to walk down a ladder to use it.
She doesn’t have to walk across a boatyard to find an open one.
She doesn’t have strangers washing their underwear in her sink.
She doesn’t have strangers trying to open the door (has anyone heard of knocking?).
She doesn’t have strangers casually chatting outside her door while, you know…
She isn’t tricked into thinking there is toilet paper.
It doesn’t cause her to start the day off in a bad mood.

Time Warp

Where are the weeks going? Time has been passing by amazingly fast. One day it’s Sunday and then it’s already at the end of another week. I don’t think time has ever gone by so fast for me. And the marina is feeling a bit like a ghost town. The boat yard has cleared out, no one is on ‘The Net’ anymore with their social events or stuff for sale. Everyone is out sailing…
But even though we are still on the hard, we had a really good day, probably the best one in awhile. Our moods were high and felt like we got a lot of work done. And what felt really good was getting the first coat of top paint on the dodger and roll bar. They are sparkly white, at least for now. We also spent another evening listening to music and making dinner. It was almost like I could breathe a little easier and enjoy the progress we have made. And I found myself getting really excited about the end result of all this work. If all continues to go as planned, we are going to have ourselves one awesome boat!

The Galley is Open!

The morning started off with rain which kinda threw off our plans for painting on the first coat of polyurethane. Bummer. I took advantage of not being able to sand and varnish (not too disappointed I have to say) and started to clean up the cabin a bit. The head which is 99% done ended up getting used as a storage room so tried to make it a bit more functional. Also did some cleaning in the aft cabin so we could sleep back there once again. But yesterday, we discovered that the hatch in the aft cabin has a lot of bubbles around it on deck. And that means… rust, which I found a bunch of while taking off one the small headliners that needed replacing. It looks kinda bad and it’s hard to restrain ourselves from just chipping away (it’s kinda fun and satisfying) but that feeling would quickly turn into ‘what have we done?!’ as big holes and an even bigger project would surely emerge. So we are just ignoring it for now and saving it for a later day.
Mike spent his morning getting the table mounted back into place and it feels like we are getting our boat back! The galley is open, we have floors to walk on, we have our table and bed again. The big inconvenience now is that I took the companionway ladder away yesterday to varnish since it was bare wood in places and covered in big paint drips. It makes getting in the cabin a little difficult, especially when the box we’re using as a step topples over, but hopefully it won’t be too long. And our friend, Ishmail, stopped by to do some more carpentry work for us. I’m not quite sure what he thought about my varnishing job on the floors, but told us that he charges 1000 Euros minimum for varnishing. Look how much money I saved us! I think I can buy those pair of Birkenstock sandals now (smile).
And in the evening, we quit working a little earlier than the past several nights so we would have time to enjoy the evening…make dinner and watch a movie. Despite some earlier and on-going feelings of frustration and tension, the evening felt much more light and promising with a little normalcy and comfort returned.

Need...More...Coffee...

The most dramatic part of our day was drinking the last of the 5# bag of French Roast coffee we brought with us. Besides that tragedy, the day was uneventful. Maybe a few more moments of feeling completely overwhelmed, not feeling that we are ever going to be done and just generally being tired of working on this boat. Other than that, it was more varnishing, deck prep (translation: epoxy paint, then putty, then sanding…ughh…now more bare metal showing, more epoxy paint, more putty, more sanding…) But we did manage to get primer on the roll bar and dodger! And tomorrow we hope to get the first coat of polyurethane paint on which means that Mike gets to start mounting stuff….like the wench (allright, so this is how I first spelled it and Mike thinks it's funny), rope clutch, exhaust fans for the engine, box for navigational equipment, maybe even the windlass!