Of all the advantages of owning a decent-sized property rather than renting an apartment, the greatest for me is being able to put anything wherever I want. There is a certain wild freedom in being able to leave my car in whichever corner I happened to use it last, without regard to assigned parking spaces; …
Boat Projects
What goes around comes around, they say. I little imagined, when I gave away my first cruising boat more than fifteen years ago, that the bread I cast upon the waters then would return in the form of another boat. What I mean is, that first boat, Capella—a 27-foot Irwin sloop my wife and I …
For the last, oh, more than a year now, the realization has been growing that it’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post. And for the past few months I’ve been meaning to sit down and write one, and even while at work muttered punch lines to myself under my breath—you know, …
My wife Danielle and I have been married for quite some time. How long exactly I can’t say—no doubt my mother has it written down somewhere—it seems that a couple times a year we get a congratulatory note from her on making it thus far. But believe me when I testify that it’s been a …
With the coming of summer, and having the dinghy project wrapped up, I was finally free to turn to a few other bits and pieces that had been pushed off the edge of the winter’s to-do list in favor of more important things. Of course, with summer underway I had plenty of other things to …
Of all the benefits of warm weather, being able to work outside is one of the finest—having the dinghy twenty feet from my front door really sped up the process of getting it done. Not only did it no longer take 45 minutes of driving ‘round trip to get to it and back, but all …
While I was willing, as the last blog post illustrates, to paint in almost all conditions in order to get Ganymede finished in time, even I had to draw the line at rain. On rainy days—of which there were plenty—I tried to get some work done on the dinghy project. We last left the new …
There was a delay of some weeks in working further on the dinghy, since Ganymede needed to be finished and got out of the marina by a certain date. It was a desperate time, with Danielle and the girls going out and sanding whenever the weather allowed, then me sanding some more after work, then …
With the buffing to shiny of the dinghy plug, which is where the last blog post left her, things could really begin to get moving. The traditional procedure would have been to apply eight or ten coats of mold release wax, followed a few more for good measure. Luckily, I have no regard for tradition, …
It is telling, perhaps, of how uninteresting sanding is, that every time you get to move from one grit to the next finer is a red-letter occasion. Imagine, if you’re still reading this after that first sentence, getting to skip straight from 36-grit to 220! It happened like this: after leaving the dinghy faired and …