April 10, 2023
***I'm going to gloss over this because it sucked, and Mark did most of the "interesting" work. He'll eventually make a blog post with all the technical details of everything he did. ***
After a week and a bit of cruising, most of it was spent in one place due to crappy weather, so we had to get to Canoe Cove Marina for the actual boat work to start...not that everything leading up to this wasn't real boat work.
We haven't spent much time in other marinas or docking the boat in strange places, so this was causing a mild amount of stress for us...especially when we learned about the famous "money maker rock" at the entrance. They assured me it was fine, but I swear there was only about 5 feet to spare between the boat and this massive rock. It was ok, though; Mark navigated the minefield of boats and rocks without issue.
We started the projects with a visit to Blackline Marine to have some rigging work done. This was pretty easy for us since someone else did all the work. A couple of days later, we had extra halyards, a new mast winch and some gear to climb the mast. Now we were off to have the boat lifted out of the water and put into the dirt parking lot where we'd be for the next couple of weeks.
There's something strange about watching your entire house be lifted from the water and put on stilts. The guys in the yard did a great job. They didn't drop it, and aside from the slings marking up my excellent wax job, nothing else went wrong with the process.
We lasted one night on the weirdly tilted boat before renting an Air BnB. We pedalled over to the boat each day, worked on her all day, and then pedalled home. Whenever we needed something, we pedalled. Needless to say, it was exhausting. We quickly realized our list of to-dos wouldn't be finished while we were in the boatyard. We prioritized the things that needed to be done while she was out of the water and pushed the other things to whenever we could finish them.
Mark tackled bit projects like re-running all the boat's electrical and plumbing. He also got to bust out his fiberglassing skills on a repair to the keel and securing the autopilot stuff. While he worked inside, I tackled waxing the boat, cleaning the teak (thank god we only have a tiny amount) and sanding and painting the bottom.
Ok. Fast forward 3 weeks (instead of the planned 2), and we were back in the water! There was a mild amount of drama when none of our sailing instruments worked right before splashing. There was some scrambling, and Mark got the depth sounder working so we could safely leave.
NM Sailed: None. Many many miles pedalled.
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