Meeting His Mistress

The confrontation was overdue: she'd taken up his every evening, and even when we were together, she was all he could talk about.  It was high time to meet the competition and work out some sort of truce.

Kevin introduced us.


She was meek, resting quietly in her cradle where she'd been stored (and neglected) for several years.  Kevin was pleased nonetheless -- as much as he loves sailing, he loves to have a hands-on project even more, and she was a few dozen of those.  I can't even begin to describe the work he's done to get her seaworthy again, but I can show you my small contribution.

First, the tour.  We climbed up the ladder to stand in the cockpit.  Here's the view, looking from there down into the cabin:


Yes, it looks bad, but a great deal of this will be stowed once the storage places are properly cleaned and restored, and then this will get cleaned up, too.  (He promised.)  Here's a view with the door shut, so you can see the woodwork.  The little brass plate (attached by a previous owner) reads "Opinions expressed by the captain are not necessarily those of the management."


Here is a view of the head, looking down at it through the hatch:

Note the absence of an actual gizmo for such needs.  Until that arrives and gets installed, we're only taking short trips.  There is a plate on the wall in here that reads "Please note: put nothing in the head that you didn't eat first."

Opposite the head is a storage closet:








And forward of those is the large sleeping berth.  An accomplished slayer of eight-legged beasties, Kevin knows that the first step in winning the battle is to kill all the insects that don't exist, first.  So, my task was to repaint the berth to a uniform white, so I wouldn't be terrified by anything except a real bug.

Here is a view of the sleeping berth as I first saw it:


Here is how it looked after the first day of painting; a little better, but still not good.

Some details:



This was a particularly tough place to reach with the paintbrush.











By the end of the weekend, the berth looked like this:


I painted the storage closet, too:















By the end of the weekend, I'd learned the hard way to tie up my hair under a bandanna before I started to paint, and to crouch before I whacked my forehead against the roof of the cabin.

We also survived a thunderstorm with 1-inch hailstones on Saturday night, so we've weathered a storm on the boat already -- our first adventure!