Living & Learning Aboard the Good Ship Learnativity

Splashdown! Learnativity is back in the water where she belongs

One day short of eight months, Learnativity returned to the sea where we belong as we “splashed” back into the waters here in Vuda Point Marina on Thursday May 3rd.  I’m a long ways from being done but this kind of job only happens about every 20 years or so and it has been a fabulous experience and yet another adventure for me.  I’ve learned more every day not only about my boat but about this Fijian culture and people I love so dearly as I have worked shoulder to shoulder with so many of them over the past eight months, been invited to join them for lunch and to their homes.  How blessed am I?!

 

 

As you can imagine “splashing” back into the water is a major milestone in this 20 year refit and renovation and one I’ve been waiting and working for a long time.  It was all very much worth the time, money and effort mind you as she truly does look like an entirely new boat sporting her new dark blue hull colour and bright white everywhere else. 

 

I’ll try to put up an album with more before and after shots for you to see just how big a difference there is and how much work has gone into this but I will post a few of them here in this post for now.

 

 

It was a VERY busy last two weeks doing everything that needed to be done to get her ready to be back in the water again such as cleaning the AutoProp, installing new transducers and zinc anodes.  My great crew from Baobab were busy finishing the bottom paint and they rolled on the last of the three coats of anti foul paint on Wednesday, the day before we splashed so it is as fresh as possible and doesn’t dry out.  And then once LTY was in the slings and off the stands they were able to finish painting the last few spots they had been covering and she was all set for her much awaited journey back to the sea.

 

I spent over five days rebuilding the Maxwell windlass (electric winch that pulls in the chain and anchor) with all new seals and motor and then getting it all mounted in its newly replaced steel home in the bow. 

 

 

 

 

I also put in all new wiring and new foot switches and she works like a charm.  I am very dependent upon this bit of kit as I have a 75kg Rocna anchor and lots of 10mm chain to haul up each time I weigh anchor so I have now completely redone this vital piece of equipment.  As you can see here, it is like a whole new boat inside as well as out.

 

 

 

I also spent several days redoing my anchor chain, replacing some of the well worn parts with some of the spare anchor chain I’ve been carrying aboard for over 5 years and adding an additional 100 feet to give me a total of over 400 feet/120m.  This gives me more options and safety for anchoring in deeper water.  I painted a few feet of the chain at 50 foot intervals and marked these with colour coded plastic chain markers and zip ties to make it easy to know how much chain I have out when anchoring.  As you can maybe start to understand, each of these “little jobs” of putting everything back together takes a long time and I am sure I have at least a full month of work before Learnativity is ready to sail again and even then there will be lots of jobs on the list of things to do while anchoring in the upcoming remote spots as I head out again.

I don’t have the new starter batteries for my main engine and generator yet so I had Mo, the marina yard jack of all trades, tow me over to our new home in the basin of Vuda Point Marina.  We are all the way around the circular basin in a great little spot that looks out west to the outlying islands.  My friends and fellow cruisers Terry and Christine from Teka Nova were very kind and came aboard as the Travel Lift lowered Learnativity into the water and helped out with lines and fenders, and Steve from Westward II and some of the Baobab crew helped out ashore as we slowly nested her into the new dock. 

One of the first things I did after securing all the lines was to give Learnativity a good wash down.  It is going to be SO nice to not be tracking dirt aboard from the yard!  With the new nonskid paint holding not only your feet but all the dirt, the decks had become quite a mess from all those trips up and down the ladder as the work continued onboard in the yard.  We have not had any rain now for almost a month as the cyclone and rainy season has ended for this year and we are back to the fabulous weather I so love, but as a result there is a lot of dust and dirt in the yard that was getting tracked onto the decks.  Fortunately there is lots of fresh water supply here after all the rains and I have a hose bib right on the small wooden dock by the bow and it felt so good to have all that fresh water on my feet and watch all that dirt go streaming off the decks to reveal my like new brilliant white decks!  I felt a bit like the Kevin Costner character in the movie Waterworld as I rid myself of all that land based dirt and got back to life on the water.

In an odd inversion of the situation though, now that LTY is back in the water I’ve moved to a beautiful new breakfast spot that is ashore.  As you may recall from many previous posts, even though I was out of the water and “on the hard” in the yard, I had this great little “tree fort” on the aft deck because I had the Travel Lift put Learnativity stern first into the beautiful big trees surrounding the work yard of the marina.  We faced East and so Ruby and I sat out there each morning and enjoyed watching the rising sun surrounded by flowering tree branches, birds and bees.  Now that Learnativity is back in the water, you can see in the photo here that we have another fabulous new spot to enjoy each sunrise and have our breakfast out on the grassy area in front of Learnativity under the palm trees.  This is facing SE so we get a whole new view out the channel and across to the many Mamanuka islands as they pop into view with the rising sun each morning.  Ruby gives this spot a four paws rating as she gets to frolic in the grass each morning doing her running wild in circles routine and greeting everyone as the yard slowly comes alive with other cruisers and workers.  And so as strange as it may seem, though all quite fitting for me, when I was on the hard I had breakfast onboard and now that I’m back in the water I’m having it ashore!  It is a pretty great life for both of us and I take a few minutes each morning as I sit in this idyllic spot to remind myself just how fortunate and charmed a life I lead.

Once breakfast is done and we are sure the sun is rising well it is back to Learnativity to work towards the next milestone which is getting her seaworthy and setting off on our first voyage with all these new changes and paint job.  Having literally removed every single thing that wasn’t welded on it is truly one of the world’s larges jig saw puzzles so I am now hard at work putting her all back together again! 

The past few days I’ve been working mostly on reinstalling all the hatches in the deck.  As part of the renovation I added three large new hatches, two which are over 2 feet square in the ceiling of the salon and one that is above the galley table.  As you can imagine from this shot the addition of all these new new hatches have opened up the boat tremendously with so much more light and fresh air.  Last night I already enjoyed the fresh breeze flowing through the boat with this added new air flow. 

 

I actually bought these new hatches long before I left San Francisco over four years ago so I’ve been looking forward to getting them installed every since and their time finally arrived!  I graduated with an honours degree from the "No project left unstarted” university but I DO get them all done eventually!   And of course everything is being closely supervised by Commodore Ruby!

 

Each hatch takes me over four hours to install as I am also taking the opportunity to redo all the ceiling and trim on the inside of the hatch openings and the hatches have to be all rebedded using 3M 5200 sealant /adhesive to make them completely waterproof and able to withstand another 20 years of surging seawater when we are underway in heavy seas.  The 5200 is wonderful stuff in terms of how well it sticks, seals and glues everything together but it is also called “devil’s glue” for a very good reason as it sticks to EVERYTHING and is soon coating your hands, tools and anything within a few feet of where you are applying it.  All worth the effort but it takes me almost an hour to carefully mold the 5200 around each hatch frame and then clean up the surrounding deck area, tools and myself before it sets up.  There are eight hatches in total now and I’ve got five of them installed and should be able to finish the last three today (Monday here), depending on what else comes up during the day to distract my ADD riddled little brain. 

 

Once the hatches are all done I’ll start on the other big job which his putting in the new glass in the salon windows.  These are the last remaining areas that are still covered in black plastic and masking tape and removing that will be a wonderful treat as I finally get light back into the salon and inside the boat and have my views back again. 

So I still have a LOT of work to do but as you can see from these two before and after pictures it has come a LONG way already and I’ll keep you posted as the progresses continues.  Thanks again for joining me on this latest grand adventure in life, love and learning.

Painting is all DONE!!!

Haven’t had time to post an update for the past two weeks as we’ve continued to push hard at finishing all the painting by doing all the non skid surfaces on the decks and the anti foul paint on the bottom of the hull.  Delighted to report that this is now all done and I should “splash” in the next few days!  After almost EIGHT months out of the water and pretty much non stop work you can imagine how exciting it is and how great it will feel to be back in the water.

 

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking so you can see what has been happening the past two weeks.  The biggest job was covering almost all the horizontal deck surfaces with non skid.  The first time consuming task was masking off all the areas that are going to stay glossy. 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of this involved long lines of masking tape that creates a bit of a tiled or paneled look.  However as you go around every block, fitting, hatch and track, and at each and every intersection and corner you have to put in some masking tape and then very carefully cut a commonly radius curve.  I didn’t count them all but there were probably more than 250 of these curves and shapes we needed to cut with razor blades. 

Once the masking was all done we applied the non skid a bit different than I previously described in that we did it pretty much all in one go.  First we rolled on a thick coat of the same gloss white polyurethane paint and then sprinkled the non skid particles, which are like coarse sand, evenly over the wet paint, waited a few minutes and rolled on another thick coat to seal in all the non skid particles.  There were three of us working that day, Isikeli, Sivan and myself and we got into a good rhythm and set of roles and were able to finish the whole job in one day and were done by about 4pm.

We had a bit of a problem at the beginning because they had changed suppliers of the non skid particles and there was only two grits available which were very different than what they had used before.  I had been checking out other boats they had done to determine how rough I wanted the non skid to be but the new grits were like the Goldilocks problem; too fine or too coarse and nothing that was “just right”.  The fine particles were like very fine sugar or salt crystals and we did a test patch with them and it was like 400 grit sandpaper, very fine in other words, and I just didn’t think this would stand up over time and give me enough of the critical safely factor I need to ensure my feet don’t slip when the decks are wet and the boat is heeling over at 30+ degrees and I’m trying to deal with some problem out on the decks in the middle of the night.  So we went with the coarse grit which ends up being like about 36 grit grinding disks!  One thing is for sure, there will be absolutely NO slipping on Learnativity!  The only new safety factor is that if you fall you're going to loose some skin! 

The decks are comfortable enough to walk on but you don’t want to be kneeling on them for long periods of time.  However over time the sharp upper corners will all wear down and over the years I will apply additional coats of white paint so it will all just improve with time and won’t need redoing for many years to come.  I decided to go with all white for both the glossy areas and the non skid in part so they are as cool as possible but also to make it easier to repaint the decks in the future.  With them all being white I can just do a minimal amount of masking of the very outer edges and then just roll or spray white over both the non skid and the glossy border areas.  Should work very well and I’m very pleased with the way this all turned out.

Once the decks were all done we could give our attention to finishing off the bottom of the hull which was still just coated with the primer we applied after the sand blasting.  There was a lot of filling to do to smooth out each corner and fair everything in nice and smooth both for hydrodynamic flow through the water as well as making it a bit easier for me when I dive down about once a month to clean off all the growth on the hull. 

 

 

Once it was all sanded and filled the boys put on three good coats of white epoxy barrier coat paint to seal between the primer and the anti foul.  After a day or two to dry they then rolled on the first two coats of the special anti foul which is a light blue in colour.  This paint contains copper and other biocides to inhibit plant and creature growth on the hull and keep it nice and slippery through the water.  Even with that I need to spend a full day or two about once a month diving down and cleaning off the growth that starts to form.  I have found that an old piece of short nap carpet works well and that along with my Sea Breathe electric air compressor or “hookah” setup that let’s me dive without Scuba tanks and just a regulator and hoses, it all works pretty well.  We will put on the third and final coat of anti foul paint the day of or day before I schedule the Travel Lift to put me back in the water so that the biocides are as fresh as possible and don’t dry out too much.

For a bit of visual appeal I had about 20 rolls of 1/8” / 3mm blue vinyl pinstripe tape shipped in (thanks John!) and as time permits I will carefully apply this pinstripe tape around the outer edges of all the non skid to glossy borders which will really set it off quite nicely. I’ve tried a few spots already and it really adds a nice touch. However this is all in the “nice to have” esthetic category and there is a VERY long list of must do items that come first as I now dive into one of the world’s largest jig saw puzzles by trying to put Humpty Dumpty Learnativity back together again.

Given that I removed literally everything that wasn’t welded on, this is a VERY big job as each hatch, winch, block, pulley, track and window have to be all cleaned and rebuilt before they go back on, every threaded hole has to be rethreaded to remove al the paint and sand blast grit and most parts need to be bedded in with sealant/adhesive. So what sounds like a simple one hour job to replace one hatch, turns into a day or more of work. But I have been busy rebuilding and cleaning all these parts for the past few months and it all feels very good to be putting Learnativity back together again and heading back for the water where we belong.

 

 

 

 

There were also two last spots on the sides of the hull where I found some bad rust pitting with my neat little sonar thickness meter and I had them cut out and replaced with new steel.  Daven and his helper made short work of it and they had it all done in just over a day. 

I marked out a section about a meter long and 6”/15cm wide and they cut it out with a cutting wheel in the grinder, welded new 6mm steel to fill this back up and then ground it down all flush with the rest of the hull.  A bit of filler and it was soon better than new and we could roll on metal primer and then cover it all with the white epoxy barrier paint and the anti fouling. 

We also had to move all the prop stands holding Learnativity up as the areas under the prop blocks had never been touched since she came out of the water back on September 5th.  It took four of us to put in a new stand beside each original one, tighten it up to take all the pressure of my 33 Ton baby and then remove the original prop stands.  Once removed it didn’t take Ron too long to grind it all down to bare steel and then build up the primer, barrier and anti foul coats on these areas.

So the painting is all done now except for that last coat of anti foul!  Very exciting milestone for me as you might imagine.  The last few days I’ve been very busy attending to all the little things that need to be done before that big splash date such as fitting the propeller onto the new prop shaft, putting in the new transducers for speed, depth, etc. which are inserted into through hull fittings in the bottom of the hull and putting on all the necessary equipment that has been removed like the rebuilt windlass (electric winch that pulls up the anchor and chain), all the anchor chain, propane tanks, life raft and a long list of other items.  The weather has been spectacular with no rain now for almost two weeks so that is helping to speed things along and let me go a bit longer with all the openings up on deck and let me delay mounting hatches and the like.  If it all goes well I’m hoping to go back in on Thursday (May 3rd).  So with any luck my next weekly update will be to tell you that I’m back in the water and send you some pictures to prove it!

Lucky Friday the 13th!

Friday the 13th is usually a lucky day for me and it certainly was this time as we had a perfect day of blue sky and sun without a drop of rain and were able to spray on the final coats of gloss white on the decks.  Yeaaahhh!  This is a big deal because it is the last of the spray painting, all the rest of the painting of the non-skid and the anti foul on the bottom will be done with rollers.  This means I can finally start removing all the masking that has been covering every hatch, window and unpainted surface since September!  It is been like living in a bat cave down inside the boat with every bit of light blocked off so it is truly like emerging from hibernation to have light back in the boat. 

The spray painting on the decks and cockpit went well as we had spent so much time doing round after round of sanding and filling, finding every little problem spot we could.  As you may recall we had been all good to go with spraying the decks back on March 28th after weeks and weeks of prep and good weather.  But the night of the 28th is when the Tropical Depressions or TD’s started to hit and culminated in Cyclone Daphne giving us a near miss so we didn’t get any work at all done for over a week and had to take down all the tarps and scaffolding when the high winds and rain were approaching. 

As you may have seen on your local news there was lots of severe flooding here in Fiji and all the roads in and out of here and the airport were washed out for several days, the airport was closed for several days, many homes lost or flooded with mud and many people died when their cars were floated away off the roads or in their homes.  Unfortunately this is an annual occurrence so everyone just pitches in and gets busy recovering and drying out.  Cyclone and rainy seasons typically end by May so we are all hoping this was the last of the storms for this year and we will now see the weather improve each week as we head into the sailing and good season here in the SW Pacific.  Here in the marina we were not too badly hit and of course the good thing about living aboard a sailboat is that you are very self sufficient so I had all my own water and power and wasn’t too badly inconvenienced, just wet and unable to get much boat work done.

This week the weather started to get back to the typical hot sunny days with thunderstorms in the late afternoon and so we were able to get all the scaffolding and tarps back up, redo all the masking and make the final rounds on the decks to wet sand everything one more and hopefully last time.  And so it was that Friday the 13th was the day we aimed for and it turned out to be truly perfect.  Brilliant blue skies greeted me at sunrise as I started getting everything ready for the crew’s arrival about 8am and by 10 we had everything all set to go, paint mixed, respirators ready and we were off.  For the first time in a very long time we didn’t even get any rain in the afternoon and had a perfect evening to let the paint dry fully.  So it was a very lucky Friday the 13th indeed!

The last time we painted the decks there was quite a problem with overspray in part due to the challenge of trying to blend all the painted surfaces in as you start and stop moving around the whole boat.  It is a very big boat and you can’t just start at the front and move your way back as there are too many areas and compartments throughout the boat to get at and not one big surface to spray.  So you end up finishing up one area, going to the next and then picking up where you left off quite a while later and the first round of paint has already dried so when you start spraying again there is a visible misted area between where you start and stop.  We also had problems with the paint mix, not enough of not the right thinners so the paint was not blending in well and not the high shine it should be.  So we paid extra attention to the paint mix this time and it all flowed very well even in the hot weather we had all day.

However the biggest help was that I spent several hours on those rainy days working out a whole choreographed routine and order in which we could spray all the areas with strategically located start/stop points that would eliminate or reduce these overspray overlap areas.  It turned out to be a very fun challenge to figure out these start/stop points, figure in where the overspray would be going as we painted one area after another and making sure we could get back into each spot when the paint was still wet. Not sure how well you can see, but the photo here is what’s left of the choreography diagram I drew up with each numbered step of the order and direction we needed to go. 

As you can see it really is like a complex dance routine but it worked very well.  The spray gun is attached to a large 5 liter pressure canister by about 20 ft./6m of dual hose that carries the air pressure and the liquid paint and you can see the (L-R) Sam, Isikelli, Ron as they clean the hose before we head up on deck.  So it takes four of us to do the job; the spray painter, the hose handler (to keep it off the freshly sprayed areas), the dust remover/tack rag handler, and the person moving the big pot down on the scaffolding. 

I did a bit of the spraying to give Ron (seen here with me just as we were finishing) and the other painter Philip, a break from time to time as this is a whole day affair and we sprayed non stop from 10am through till just after 4pm and the fumes can get a bit overwhelming even with respirators.  Mostly though I was the choreographer showing Ron where to stop and start and always at the ready with the tack rag to wipe down each area just before we sprayed for any last bits of dirt or bug as well.  Oh, and also he very necessary sweat rag as it literally runs off you in this heat and one of our biggest challenges was to keep from dripping onto the surfaces as we were painting as that would leave a nasty mark where the paint won’t stick.  Wearing a full Tyvek white suit with lots of head rags helped, but it was a constant challenge to prevent any drops from landing on the paint.  So when I say that a lot of blood sweat and tears have gone into this renovation I really mean it quite literally!  It was a very long hot day but we were all smiles by 4:30 when we could put the gun down and step back to admire those shiny white decks!

Today is Saturday and just to remind me how lucky yesterday was, it has been raining non stop since sunrise this morning!  However the paint had plenty of time to cure and this morning Ron and Sam came by for a few hours to help remove some of the masking and then I continued doing so for most of the rest of the day. 

There is still probably another few days of just removing all he plastic and masking tape as we had to mask everything that couldn’t be removed like the mast, boom, rear solar panels, railing and so on.  I needed to remask the side windows in the salon as it will be a big job for next week or so to install all the new glass in them but I was able to finally remove the masking from the front windows in the salon and the cockpit and see through them for the first time in almost eight months! 

This is also an exciting milestone because it marks the turning point where I can now start the huge job of putting my Humpty Dumpty Learnativity back together again!  Having removed literally everything that isn’t welded on, I have my work cut out for me to reinstall all the sail tracks, rigging, lines, winches, windows, hatches and so on.  But it will feel great doing so and I watch my “new” boat emerge and we start heading for the water.  There are two more paint jobs to be done, the non skid surfaces on the deck and cockpit areas and then finish painting the bottom of the hull with the last of the primer, then barrier coat and finally anti foul paint.  I’m still hopeful that I will be back in the water in early May so keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned to see how it all goes and what the all new Learnativity looks like!

I’ll let the photos do most of the talking and put in a short album of some of the shots as we were painting and the finished results. Remember, you can enlarge any of photos in any of these blog postings just by clicking on them.

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Talk about Exponential Learning Density! Year #5 Begins

Joined by my son Skyler, seen in the photo on our earlier 4am departure from Bodega Bay) and Ruby the Wonderdog, I sailed out under the Golden Gate bridge on March 3, 2008 so I’m now starting year number five of this grand adventure and Wow! what a ride, what a life, what a privilege it has been every day since! 

NOTE:  I’ll put a photo album at the end with some additional pictures and note that if you click on any of the pictures here you will get the full size view.

 

 

 

If you will indulge me I’ll do a bit of reflecting on these past four years of truly living life large.  Sailing from one great experience to the next have taught an incredible number of lessons and created a life which for me is nothing short of awemazing. Each day has been filed with more adventures, experiences, living, loving and learning than I thought was possible for one person to experience in a full lifetime never mind just four years. 

I continue to be struck by what I wrote about a two years ago when I was in New Zealand reflecting on the start of my third year at the time and trying to comprehend how I could have experienced so much in just two years.  I eventually made some sense out of it and what I called “Exponential Learning Density” or ELD.  In the coming weeks and months I’ll write more about that and some of the other major lessons I’ve learned in the last four years and over 25,000 nautical “smiles” as I like to call them.  As I’ve recounted these lessons to others via Email, visits and even some pubic presentations many people have confirmed that these are lessons in life that completely transcend their origins in sailing and I get a lot of requests to write these up and share them online so more people can access them and I’ll do my best to try and articulate these as best I can and share them with you here.

First let me set the scene with a quick overview of how this all came to be. 

I named the boat Learnativity, a word I had created about twenty years ago when I couldn’t seem to find a word to describe something I think we do all the time. We have words such as learning, working, creating, inventing, discovering and I use them all a lot.  But these individual words suggest that they are discrete and independent activities on our part whereas my sense has always been that we do these all simultaneously as we go about our daily lives solving problems, making choices and just living. Do we really stop learning and start working and vice versa? Not in my experience and so I came up with Learnativity as an amalgam of all these and focal point for what I wanted to explore, talk about, experience and grow.

Sailing is something completely new to me.  I grew up living all over Canada and Europe as my Dad was a chef in the Canadian army.  No nautical background in my history or my family tree.  No life long childhood dream of going to sea.  I just happened to serendipitously stumble over sailing about ten years ago on a family vacation in Polynesia, where thanks to Diana’s great planning we chartered a sailboat (WITH a captain I might stress), for a week.  I didn’t really know it then but as I reflect back now I think that is when the sailing bug first bit me. Over the next five years I became more and more curious and fascinated by sailing, read lots, had more charted boat vacations with my dear friends John and Michelle and soon reached a familiar conclusion for me that the only way to learn more was through the experiential learning of doing it myself. I particularly relish diving head first into the deep end of my many pools of ignorance and so I figured what I really needed to do was go sailing long term, indefinitely in fact.  No destination in particular, rather a journey of grand adventure through the world’s oceans in general.  Yea right, that’s the plan, my favorite kind; the no plan plan!

And so the search for my first boat began and spent almost two years figuring out what I wanted and needed in a boat by scouring the worldwide used boat market, going to boat shows, reading and talking with anyone who would put up with my incessant questions.  Then one day in early 2005 I found just the right boat for me in Sidney BC, just outside Victoria, the one town where my parents retired and I had finished high school and started university. She is a 52’ steel monohull sailboat built from 1992-94 by Kristen Yachts and after several visits and much discussion I bought her from the original owner and took possession in July 2005 in Friday Harbour.  Yikes!

She was in good shape overall having not been sailed much at all but was lived in and used by the owner and sometimes his young family as he used it as an office for his geographical plotting work of sea bottoms.  However as I learned more and more, she was not set up for open ocean or blue water sailing but for short day sails and certainly not possible to be sailed single handed around the world.  I didn’t know a thing about boats really and somehow I missed the memo that you can’t sail a boat this size by yourself so I just jumped in with my usual ignorant bliss and got going with what would turn out to be a two year refit to get her ready to set sail on this grand adventure.  While I didn’t know anything about boats, I’m pretty handy and I can figure most things out and I’m a good problem solver and more than anything I LOVE learning by doing. 

With lots of help along the way of my great friend John and his dad Juan on several occasions, as well as too many other friends old and new to mention, I spent the first six months visiting the boat up in Victoria/Sidney and then later moved her over to Port Townsend for more extensive work in the boatyard there as they specialized in steel (and wooden) boats.  During the winter months in Port Townsend we sandblasted the bottom of the hull back to bare steel and put on new epoxy primer, sealer and anti foul paint, installed a new bow thruster, cleaned fuel tanks and put in a complete new fuel line system, pumps and filters, new AutoProp propeller and many other renovations. 

Joined by my good friend Steve we even managed to take her on a trial run back over to Vancouver Island and docked right in front of the Empress Hotel!  One of the things that grabbed me very early on in my research into sailing was the fact that you can legally anchor your boat in the middle of almost any harbour in the world!  As long as you aren’t blocking any shipping or sea plane lanes, the world is quite literally your oyster.  How kewl is that?!  I can anchor in front of hotels that are costing their guests thousands of dollars a night, have a view to die for and sleep in my own bed for “free”!  How can you not go for that?!

 

The Port of Port Townsend (had to say that for you Skyler!) was a great marina to work on a steel boat but it was way too far away for me to get there as often as I wanted and needed to.  My home and workshop were down in Petaluma, about 50 miles north of San Francisco so I was anxious to move the boat down close to there as soon as weather would permit.  Bodega Bay, which is just north of SF Bay proved to be a great spot that was less than 20 minute drive from my home and workshop and where I ended up working on her for almost two years to get her ship shape for single handed blue water sailing.

There were many attempts to get Learnativity down south to Bodega Bay that were thwarted by weather windows that suddenly snapped shut.  Even my friend Robin from England (seen on the right) flew in for one of these aborted attempts and my dear friend Erik from Antwerp had a memorable flight into Port Angeles to lend a helping hand.   Erik had an even more memorable experience the next day when he woke up and came up on deck to find himself swinging from a Travel Lift carrying the boat over to its final resting spot on the hard stands!

But finally, joined by a brave crew of John and his Dad Juan from Florida and two of my Autodesk colleagues and friends Dave and JohnH (the mermaid and the shark declined to join us) we finally set out for Bodega Bay on May 6, 2006.  As we were to learn, the west coast of North America, in fact every continent, is not very friendly to sailors with few points of entry and all of them difficult. 

 

 

 

The weather is also still very iffy this time of year and we ran into a severe storm about 60nm off the Oregon coast and made the call to head for Crescent City on the Oregon/California border to seek shelter from the worsening conditions that kept increasing to over 50 knot winds and 5 meter seas all the while the forecasts were calling for mild conditions.  The entry into Crescent City was even more challenging as none of us had ever entered it before, it was a challenging entry at the best times and we were doing it at night in storm conditions!  But we made it in just fine and were soon all sleeping soundly down below, snuggly tied up to the docks.  Now THAT is experiential learning!

I needed to change the name of the boat as it was the name of the original owner’s business and so began my search for just the right name. Almost as important as naming your children I knew this was a name that would be with me for a long, long time, one I would be saying on the VHF radio every day as I called others or was being hailed, on every document I filled out as I checked in and out of each new port around the world and so I gave it great thought and deliberation. I wanted a name that would be unique and capture the essence of what this ship was all about for me and the great unknown adventures which lay ahead. Not finding any existing names or words that seemed to fit I was soon trying to create my own word by putting together bits and pieces of others such as my kids names and trying these out on everyone who would lend an ear. It was my two great kids who nailed it though when they just looked at me, with those wonderfully quizzical looks teenage children give their Dad when they are so puzzled at your apparent blindness and ignorance, and said “You’re kidding right Dad? You already have the perfect name for this boat; Learnativity!” Duh! Smack! Of course! If there was one single explanation for this otherwise insanity of buying my first boat and sailing it around the world, it was my love of learning. I love jumping into the deep end of my pools of ignorance, and trust me those ends are VERY deep and numerous!  Though I had no inkling of the depths of this connection, I was pretty sure that I would be learning, working, inventing, discovering and a whole lot more every day I owned and sailed this ship. So Learnativity it was and she has lived up to that name every single day since then in more ways and depth than I could have ever imagined.

OK, enough of my nostalgic reflections for now.  Thanks to every one of you who have helped me so generously and kindly in so many ways to be out on this grand adventure.  I could not possibly be leading this charmed and full life without each and every one of you.  I’ll be back with more stories of some of the bigger lessons I’ve learned along the way.

 

		s/v Learnativity: the Adventure Begins! VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Kava & the Simple Joys from Nothingness

Friday night I had an extremely special experience when Isikelli one of the guys on my Fiji paint crew from Baobab Marine (left front behind Ruby in this photo) invited me to his home for a visit and some kava.  Kava as you may know from my previous posts over the past two year’s I’ve been in Fiji, is the ceremonial drink here in Fiji and many of the other Southern Pacific islands.

This Kava drink is made from the dried and aged roots of the Kava tree which are then pounded or ground into a fine powder and mixed it with fresh water. Kava is part of a ceremony and historic cultural tradition called “Sevusevu” which is what I experience each time I first anchor off shore from one of the small inhabited islands here in Fiji. 

As soon as I have my anchor down and inspected so I know Learnativity is secure, I put the dingy in the water and row ashore to meet with the chief and ask for his blessings and permission to be there. When I arrive ashore I am usually greeted by a gaggle of giggling children and seek out an adult to ask to take me to their chief.  I bring with me about a pound or half kilo of kava roots which I have purchased previously in one of the bigger city vegetable markets and keep a stock of onboard.  Usually my adult guide takes the kava from me and talks with me as we walk to get a bit of background on me, where I’m from, where I have just sailed from, how long in Fiji, and so on.  They introduce me to the chief and give him a summary of from this conversation and I am then invited to sit across from the chief sitting on a large hand woven mat.  I present the chief with the kava and he places it in front of him as we sit cross legged he then says a prayer in Fijian, we clap three times when he has done so and the then welcomes me to his island and we chat for a bit more before I take my leave and return to the boat. More informally, Kava is also the traditional drink that Fijian men usually have at the end of the day when they get home from work and is similar to having a beer or wine after work.  Several times while anchored for longer times off one of these islands I've been invited ashore to join them which has been a great gift and treasured experience.

On Friday however I had a whole new and even more intense experience with kava and the Fijian people and their way of life when one of my regular Fijian paint crew and friend Isikeli invited me to join him at his home for such a drink of kava. I was not sure what I could bring as a gift of thanks and appreciation but I remembered that I had about 2lbs/1kg of kava root still on board in my stores from sailing here last year and so I wrapped this up with ribbon into a bouquet like form that is the tradition here and took that along with me. Moreover, he had expressly invited Ruby to come along as he had been telling his daughters about Ruby the Wonderdog for months and she is also a "gift" for most people we meet. 

 

 

 

Isikeli lives with his two daughters Vani (2) and Marica (4) and his wife Salome who unfortunately was not able to join us as she works nights at the neighboring First Landing resort which is next to the Vuda Point Marina where I’ve been since September.  They live only a kilometer or two away and he and his oldest daughter, Marica (Fijian for Martha), met me at the marina and we walked over to their home. They recently moved into a new rental property that is situated in the middle of a large set of sugar cane fields and it was a perfect evening and just starting to cool off as the sun was starting to set (about 6:30pm).  Their home is an adjoining half of the landlord's home and he joined us for the last half of the walk to the house where Ruby and I were introduced to the kids playing in the houses and yard and Isikeli's sister in law. 

The kava roots need to be pulverized into powder and they fetched a large tall cast iron or steel urn that they used for this purpose. It needed to be cleaned out of rust and water so they wiped it all out and then lit some newspaper on fire inside it to burn off the remainder, wiped it clean and it was ready to use.  Isikeli, his older son and the man who owns the houses where they live all took turns in pounding the kava with a long heavy steel rod that was about 4cm in diameter and 2.5m long until the kava roots were transformed into a fine powder.

 

 

My offers to assist were politely declined as the men took turns raising the rod high overhead and then bringing it down as hard as possible onto the kava roots inside the urn.  This process took quite some time, almost an hour or so by the time it was fully pulverized and was a significant and sweaty effort in the hot humid night air.  All the while I was invited to sit on the woven grass mat, enjoy a tea and some biscuits as Ruby and I played with the 3 young girls who came and went from inside the house to the covered porch we were sitting on, and the yard.

 

 

As has been surprisingly common, the kids and even many adult men are quite fearful of Ruby at first as they have never seen anything like her. There are LOTS of dogs here but they are mostly roaming free and not in very good health as the concept of having domestic pets is not common in Fiji. With her strange curly black hair and small size many think she is some kind of wind up or electric toy! It took a while for the little girls to get closer and closer to Ruby, reach out and touch her and finally end up sitting with her, petting her and their initial wary squeals were transformed into that joyous giggling of little girls.

 

Kava has a very distinctive smell that is hard to describe but has a very earthy, spicy smell much like you might expect from a root. They were very pleased with the kava I brought as apparently it was very good quality and this was a very large quantity for them as it made enough kava powder for several months of drinking. Isikeli then brought out his kava bowl and his son put a few heaping tablespoons full of kava powder into a cloth bag which he then kneaded in the large bowl of fresh water. It is a bit like making drip coffee or tea in that you do not want the kava powder itself to be in the water you just want to extract all the flavour out of the powder into the water. Isikeli continued to knead the bag in the water for about 10 minutes to extract all the flavour from the powered kava.

 

Once it was all mixed to his satisfaction, Isikeli brought out the traditional kava “cups” which are hollowed out halves of a coconut shell and offered me the first drink. You accept the bowl with both hands and while the other guests toast you and clap three times you then drink the kava in one steady go and when you are done they all clap three more times and you pass the bowl back to the “chief” of the ceremony. In our case it was just Isikeli and myself and once we had both had a cup Isikeli would place the lid back on the big bowl and we would talk some more and then he would serve another round about every 15-20 minutes.  Kava is apparently mildly intoxicating but I have never had enough to feel any such effect and it just makes your lips, tongue and throat a bit numb. The bowl is then filled and passed amongst all the guests and then you usually sit around, chat for a while, and then repeat the whole process. It is a very old tradition and very special to be a part of.

I had my pocket camera with me and the girls were all quite intrigued with it and wanting to see pictures of themselves so that along with Ruby provided lots of fun for all of us throughout the evening as the girls got closer and closer to Ruby, petted her and worked up their courage with this very strange creature. 

Isikeli had even brought out a small can of tuna and some crackers for Ruby which Vani (the brave one of the two) served to her as you can see in this photo.  I also used several bites of soda crackers to entice Ruby to perform her full repertoire of entertaining tricks like standing on her hind legs, sit, down, dancing and giving High Fives all the accompanying music of giggles and laughs from the girls. 

 

And so this most wondrous and simple time passed with Isikeli and I talking, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with his two girls and older son.  Fijian families usually speak Fijian in their homes and with their kids and then they learn English “immersion” style once they start school, which is usually when they are about five years old and start half day Kindergarten classes.  So the young girls don’t speak much English yet but as usual it was no problem to communicate these simple pleasures of looking at pictures and playing with Ruby.  The time passed in that oxymoronic way where it is all luxuriously slow and peaceful and yet in the end seems to go by in a blink.

 

We stayed until almost 9 o’clock, which is quite late here, and then walked back to the boat. Isikeli and Marica walked us out to the end of the sugar cane fields and then Ruby and I walked the last km back to the boat under a beautiful starry sky. The moon is rising and setting very early now so it was not in the sky at all so the sky was even darker and the stars shining even brighter than usual.  It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and find my way along the dirt roads but the road is quite wide and not a problem to walk along as we made our way back to our little nest in the trees.  I was not sure if we would be eating as part of this visit and I had been so busy with all the painting that I had not eaten since breakfast so I made up a quick snack back on the boat and was soon nodding off on the settee as I was pooped from a hard hot week of painting. I awoke a few hours later and stumbled my way into the aft cabin and was soon fast asleep in bed with Ruby curled up at my side and we were off to dream land here in this magical land called Fiji.

While it fails miserably to capture the magic of the evening, I have done my best here to describe what this evening was like.  As with all experiential learning, this is not something that can be explained well in words and as the saying goes, "You really had to be there".  It may sound to many like a very simple and even "boring" evening where “nothing” happened.  Yet for me it was truly magical and memorable time.  To be invited into the home and lives of these simply beautiful people, to have even just a few hours to become part of this moment in time was such a deeply authentic and Oh so real moment for me.  I seem to be blessed with gifts like these all the time out here on this grand sailing life adventure and you can see why I say that I lead a truly charmed life.

Many of you ask what the heck I do with all my time out here “doing nothing”.  It is a very reasonable question and one can fully understand as I often wonder myself where all the time has gone.  But as you read more and more of my stories perhaps you can begin to understand just how full my time “doing nothing” is!  I’m actually fascinated by the whole concept of “nothingness” and is why I have been devouring books like Stephen Hawking’s “Universe in a Nutshell” and Lawrence Krauss’ “A Universe from Nothing” that I am reading now.  Turns out that as best these physicists and cosmologists can figure out, everything from our very selves to the entire cosmos around us has been created from "nothing” and how over 90 percent of the energy in the cosmos exists in the “nothing” that is left when you remove every atom, electron, proton and quark of visible matter.

In a similar way, I live a life of profound joy that seems to be similarly created out of “nothingness” with the eclectic range of activities that include sailing from one magical destination to the next, experiencing the wonders of Mother Nature, endless boat repairs and maintenance juxtaposed between equally endless sunrises and sunsets, and then truly living IN life’s moments when snorkeling or laying under a full night sky or sitting with some of the local people I meet along the way.  To badly paraphrase Al Green’s “Use me” song, If this is what it feels like to do nothing, then nothing me up please!

LTY Weekend Update: March 25, 2012

Whew!  It has been a hot, sweaty, long week or more of doing all the prep work and final painting of the “racing stripes”  on the top and bottom of the dark Awlgrip “Azure blue” sides of the hull and the many surfaces, nooks and crannies of the decks and cockpit.  We doing all this with the glossy white Awlgrip or polyurethane paint that will be the final colour for all these surfaces and I think you may agree that the contrast between the white and the blue is very striking.  For some reason we had quite a few problems with this last round of painting with dirt, bugs and bird droppings and also with the “man made” problems of it being so hot that is is almost impossible to prevent drops of sweat to fall onto the freshly painted surfaces as this is all being done out in the direct and very intense sun here and with all the overhead tarps removed as you can see in the pictures.  Ron the painter is doing the best he can but you can imagine how much you perspire when all wrapped up in the white Tyvek suits and full face mask in these 100/35 plus temperatures.  But we now have the first coats of gloss white on the decks and the final coats of white on the “racing stripes” (surely good for an additional knot of speed when sailing don’t you think?!). 

 

To my mind and eye the hull has turned out spectacularly well and I could not be happier with the results after so many months of literal blood, sweat and tears with my phenomenal Fijian crew from Baobab Marine.  Learnativity’s hull is extraordinarily well insulated with about 4” of sprayed in place foam insulation and paneling throughout that there won’t be any problem with the additional solar heat that a darker surface creates and the only downside I can imagine right now is that it will show the dirt and salt accumulation a bit more and require more diligence on my part to keep it all clean and shiny.  But these are mere cosmetic issues and well worth it for the smile and joy I will have every time I row up to Learnativity or admire her from shore.

 

In hindsight it would have been much smarter to have used vinyl tape for the white stripes on the hull as I had not realized how much work it was going to be to carefully tape and more so sand all these stripe areas.  The sanding of the underlying blue painted surfaces where the new white stripes would go was particularly slow as I had to sand each stripe carefully by hand to create a good surface for the new paint to stick to and sand carefully and exactly up to the fine line of the special masking tape and yet not damage the thin tape so the edge of the painted stripes would hold well and be perfectly straight and smooth.  It took me three solid days of non stop sanding just to get them all done but again the efforts were well worth it. 

It is experiences like this remind me why I am able to feel such profound joy when I’m out enjoying a great sail, or standing on deck under another awemazing night sky or toasting yet another fabulous sun down.  One of the reasons I value experiential learning so much is the great joy we derive from the feelings of complete contentment with the fruits of our labour as you do that big “exhale” at the end of an exhausting day (which is why I think it is called “exhausting” BTW) and you have this magical combination of being completely spent and yet filled with that deep inner satisfaction of seeing the results of all your hard work.  For many of us in our professional careers the results of our work are often much less visible or tangible, yet no less there, but when you work with your hands to create, improve or repair things, these feelings are very intense and Oh so much a part of experiencing profound joy in life.  I’ve come to realize this even more clearly over the past four years out sailing as I have come to understand why such simple things as watching a sundown from my aft deck or just being out under an impossibly immense star filled sky or being one with the underwater world as I snorkel, are all so meaningful and joyous because of how much “blood, sweat and tears” I’ve put into making those moments possible. 

My hope is that my sharing with you of some of my recent experiential learning might have stimulated you to reflect on some of your many past moments of such great joy as you “inhale” all the powerful positive joyous energy these create and help power you through the coming days, weeks and months.

The decks and cockpit are much more labour intensive both for prepping and painting as there are very few large flat surfaces and mostly all small spots of all angles, shapes and sizes. 

Tomorrow (Monday here) we will start in on what should be the last round of light sanding all the deck and cockpit surfaces and if the current round of hot dry days continues we should be able to finish all the spray painting by the end of next week.  This will be a particularly welcomed milestone for me as I will finally be able to peel off all the plastic and masking tape that has been covering very window and hatch area on the boat and has turned my usually bright interior into a dark “boat cave” with no natural light getting through.  It has been this way since I hauled out at the beginning of September and I don’t dwell on it but it will be SUCH a great to have windows and hatches I can see through, skies and light that I can see above me and fresh breezes blowing through the cabins.  These two will be more of those moments of great joy as I appreciate them all the more for what it takes to have such gifts in my life.

Many of you commented on how much you liked the last album of photos I posted when painting the hull blue so I will let the pictures do the rest of the talking and post this latest album of the latest progress painting the stripes and decks.  Hope that sharing some of my joy stimulates more of your own.

 

Wayne

		White Stripes & Decks VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

LTY Weekend Update: March 10, 2012

Another busy week here in Vuda Point Marina on the big renovation of the good ship Learnativity as we finished all the prep work for the topsides of the hull (waterline up to the deck) and started in on the preparation of the deck surfaces for their upcoming coats of glossy white and then anti skid paint.

The topsides are the most visible part of the boat for those ashore or when you are looking at her from the water so we have been working hard to get those surfaces as smooth and flat as possible.  This is especially important as I’m going to change the colour from white to dark blue and as you would know from looking at black or dark colour cars the darker colours show every little imperfection and ripple.  Of course Learnativity is a 20 year old steel boat so I’m not looking for perfection and what the crew from Baobab Marine and I have settled on is that if we can feel it with our hands we remove it, which would be small dents, dings and hollows.  We won’t be able to fully remove the larger scale waves in the steel plate surfaces but Learnativity was so well built originally that most people mistake it for a fiberglass boat because the steel surfaces are so smoothly curved.  Most steel boats are built with what are called “chines” which are hard edges that result from building the boat with straight sections of steel plate and forming the curves for the hull by creating these faceted surfaces.  But Learnativity was built by cold forming the 6mm steel plate over top of the ribs and stringers built up to create the shape of the hull and welding the plate in place as it was bent around these curved ribs.  You may recall seeing how we did the same thing a few weeks ago when we welded in all the new steel sections in the undersides of the hull for added strength and to replace some rusted sections.  So the last month or so has been a recurring cycle of priming, filling and sanding the hull with long sanding boards and orbital sanders to get the surfaces all smooth and flat.  That’s all behind us now and these surfaces are all ready for the final spraying of the dark “Aristo” blue polyurethane paint.  We are hoping to do that on Tuesday as the weather looks good that day with no rain and we will use Monday to mask off the bottom of the hull and the decks to protect them from all the blue overspray and do the last fine inspection for any small bits we might have missed.  You can try to imagine how big the surface area of a 52’ boat is and we have been over every square millimeter of that surface many, many times now.

I also spent quite a bit of time figuring out just what colour blue I wanted to have.  You don’t realize how many shades of blue, or any colour, there are until you start to look closely.  I had a good set of paint chips from the paint company to choose from and they were very handy as they had a hole drilled in the middle of each one which let me put it up against another boat or object that was painted blue and easily see how close or far it was from the paint chip colour.  So I spent several days wondering around the yard looking for every bit of blue paint I could find on other boats or tarps or stripes.  I wanted to have a blue that looked blue at any time, in strong sunlight and shade and so I didn’t want to have that really dark Navy blue that often looks black yet neither did I want something too light or “baby blue”.  Ahh, the troubled life I lead!  Finally settled on one paint chip and had the factory mix up just one liter of it and send it to us so we could paint a small test patch and see what it really looked like.  as you would know from painting at home colours look so different when they are on a large surface than on the paint chip in the store.  I thought we would have to go through a few rounds to adjust a bit darker or lighter but I was delighted when the test patch up on deck as you can see here in the photo, turned out to be just what I wanted.  Like Goldilocks and the three bears, it wasn’t too dark, not too light, it was just right!  The factory quickly mixed up the whole batch and all 20 liters of it arrived on Friday.  Now we just need a day with no rain next week and the hull will make its transformation to beautiful Aristo Blue.

With the hull all ready for final top coats our attention turned to the decks and as you can see in the photos here we are making good progress as we do the final stages of the paint, fill, sand cycles up here.  The deck is quite a bit more work and slower than those expanses of long flat steel on the hull as it is almost nothing but nooks and crannies where all the life line stanchions attach to the deck for example and all the areas around the hatches, fittings, tracks, windows and the like.  However if you compare these photos to the ones from last month you can see how far things have come.  The white is the primer/filler paint that was sprayed on a few weeks ago after we had finished all the major filling, grinding, welding and sand blasting and covered all the base primer that was that reddish brown colour.  The green you see in these pictures is the paste epoxy filler that is mixed up to the consistency of peanut butter, spread on with putty knives and fingers and then sanded down once hard. 

You can see that things are turning out so well because Commodore Ruby continues to be on watch at all times and we are all under close supervision.

So all is well over here on this side of the world.  My mornings continue to be wonderful sunny retreats up in my tree fort on the aft deck and life continues to unfold just as it should.  More to follow after the hull is all shiny and blue so stay tuned.

It’s SO great to be Blue!

Yes folks, the big day finally arrive today. Tuesday March 13th here and a very lucky day it was indeed.  After months and months of work the great crew from Baobab Marine and I were finally ready to spray on the new Arista blue paint on Learnativity’s topsides! 

 

The weather looked to be perfect with another wondrous start to the day with brilliant blue skies and sun pouring through the tree branches as it rose this morning.  The crew arrived just after eight and we did the final inspection, fine sanded a few small spots and then wiped the entire surfaces down with thinner and rags to get rid of any last traces of dust or grit.

 

 

 

Ron, the new painter for Baobab who has been working with us steadily for the past 3 weeks was all suited up and started spraying at 10am.  You can see him here with the very first hit of the spray gun as the new Aristo Blue starts to replace the formerly all white Learnativity.  He works his way down one side and back up the other and then starts over again to put on each coat.  All in all we put on 5 coats, 20 liters of polyurethane in all so Learnativity is VERY well covered!

Here is my whole paint crew for you to see.  In the photo on the left Lorenzo, the overall supervisor who I work with for the whole renovation is on the far right and then he came and took the picture on the right so I could stand in with them.  They are SUCH a great group of guys to work with and it has been such an big bonus of doing all this work here to get to know them and learn so much more about the people, cultures and attitudes of the beautiful people of this country.  Thanks guys!  Now let’s get back to work on those decks!! <g>

 

 

I think I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves to show you more about the whole paint job today and give you a little album here to look through at your leisure.  Suffice it to say that it turned out GREAT and I am VERY happy.  The Aristo Blue colour changes just like I had hoped in the different lighting from shade to direct sun and I hope some of that comes through in the photos.  Enjoy looking at my shiny new blue boat!  I sure am!

		Learnativity turns Blue! VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

LTY Weekend Update; March 3, 2012

Another productive week here in Vuda Point marina aboard the good ship Learnativity.  The weather is frankly just wonderful; hot and sunny mornings, clouds and thunder build in the afternoon and we get a bit of rain about half of the time but it only lasts for a few hours at most and we’ve had some spectacular sunsets and sunrises. 

It may sound as strange to you as it does to me given that Learnativity is out of the water and jacked up on stands in the middle of a busy boat yard, but I have this incredible perch up in the trees where I sit and welcome in each day as I sit out on my aft deck about 5 meters/18 feet up in the air.  The way I have them lift Learnativity out of the water in the Travel Lift is such that I was able to get them to put my aft end in right up against the beautiful trees surrounding the end of the marina and work yard so as you can see in the pictures, if you didn’t know better you would think I’m living in a tree fort. 

 

I start each morning by rising just as the first light of day is streaming up over the eastern horizon of verdant hills which are off in the distance behind those trees and green grassy field.  Ruby gets her ritual full tummy rub as we both get the sleep out of our eyes and then I fix up my favorite breakfast of yogurt, whole wheat bread, chunky peanut butter, dried cherries and a glass of cold milk and head up on deck to sit in my breakfast perch. 

The tree branches are an arms distance away and filled with a myriad of different birds as they too start their day with their breakfast.  As you can see if you look closely at the picture on the right, Ruby enjoys this time as well as she chases the saucy little birds that fly onboard and try to sneak off with a few pieces of her dog food. The other photos below will give you a bit more of a panorama view of the view from the front and sides of the boat and help you visualize the whole location here in the marina and boat yard.

The last two mornings have been particularly marvelous as the sun and sky have been brilliantly clear and the whole marina is enveloped in the early morning light, the sounds of birds chirping and a light fresh breeze through the trees.  Part of living life well for me is surrounding myself in beauty and this will give you an idea of one of the ways I do so.

Boat work wise this week saw the completion of the final preparation of the topsides of the hull for the dark blue paint they are about to get this coming week.  You quickly learn just how big a 52 foot boat is when you have to go over every square centimeter of that hull with your hands!  That’s been done many times by many times thanks to the fabulous crew of guys from Baobab Marine (named after some of those trees surrounding me) and so we now have a very smooth surface with no more pinholes, dents, scratches or other marks.  The new dark blue paint is being mixed up at the factory and should be here on Monday and then it is a matter of trying to read the weather right for a day where there won’t be any rain and spray it all on.  Should take about four or five coats of colour to build up the full colour and cover everything completely and these all go on in one go as the painter goes round and round the boat.

This week was therefore filled with finding the last spots needing more filing and sanding and then covering it all with one last coat of white primer as you can see in the pictures.  Then we taped the top and bottom edges a bit beyond where thee bottom paint and the top deck paint lines will go and washed it all down thoroughly.  The big tarps went back up, the old masking was replaced with new on all the port windows and she is all ready for the final colour coat!  When the blue paint arrives and it looks like we have a rain free day, we’ll wash and wipe it down again and transform the hull from the white of old to the Corinthian Blue of new.  That will be a very exciting day and milestone as you can imagine and I’ll share it all with you when it happens, hopefully in next weekend’s update.

With the topsides all done our attention not turns to the even bigger job of painting the deck surfaces with gloss white and non-skid white paint.  A much longer job as there is so much hand sanding and filling to be done of all the nooks and crannies you might imagine are on a sailboat’s decks with all the rigging, windows, hatches and fittings.  But we have already done a great deal of sanding, filling and priming so this is the final stages of that and should go well.  I’ve been busy cleaning and rebuilding all the fittings, hatches and rigging so they are ready to go back on as soon as the gloss is all sprayed. This too will take quite a bit of time because each hole has to be rethreaded to remove all the paint and filler they are now covered with, then the mating surfaces have to be caulked and fastened down firmly to seal them.  I get great joy from doing all this but it is slow work and has to be all done before we can tape off all these fittings, tracks and hatches to protect the gloss around them from the non skid paint we will then apply.  That’s all weeks away though so I’ll bring you pictures and details in the weekend updates to come.

It was also an unusually and wonderful week for me socially this week.  On Wednesday Ruby and I were invited over to fellow cruisers Terry and Christine on Teka Nova.  They are from the UK and also have a steel boat very similar to Learnativity and are also out of the water and busy doing lots of boat work.  We’ve been trading stories, tools and helping each other out along the way and they invited us over for the evening.  And what an evening it was!  Their boat was build in Finland and the interior woodwork in particular is beautiful.  Christine in particular loves hosting dinner parties and she really knocked herself out.  We had a full spread of food from appetizers to a main meal of pork loin with passion fruit sauce, fresh peas and carrots, and potatoes in cream sauce with garlic onions and spices all followed with a delectable dessert of lime pie that was somewhere between cheesecake, cream and heaven.  Not content with just fabulous food Christine had also laid out the dining table with a full compliment of glassware, silverware, fine china and flowers.  She even made up a special meal for Ruby and Terry dug into his wine “cellar” to add to the wine I brought along.  As wonderful as the meal was, the conversations and stories were even better and yet again I was reminded just how charmed a life I lead.  Then on Friday two fellow cruisers Nick and Barbara on Val, also a steel boat that was out of the water for painting and had been our next door neighbours for the past month, invited Ruby and I and most of the other yachties who are living here, over to celebrate them going back in the water.  Just a wee bit envious of this, Ruby and I joined a very full boat for an evening of appetizers and wine.  So as you can see, life here is pretty rough, but I’m holding up OK and can’t wait for whatever is coming next.

Last but not least, this week ends with me marking the start of my fifth year out on this grand sailing adventure.  Almost impossible for me to believe that it has been so long but more so short given the amazing number of experiences I’ve had and I’m going to make that the topic of a series of posts over the coming weeks as I reflect back on all this and share some of the lessons in life much more than sailing, which I’ve learned.  I’ve only sailed a bit more then 25,000 nautical miles in the past four years but that’s more than most people get to experience and it has been SO dense with awemazing adventures, new sights, sounds, people, cultures and filled to overflowing with life, love and learning that it would take me more years to write about it all than it has to experience.  I’ll do my best to summarize a few of the major lessons I’ve learned along the way for you starting with the next post.

LTY Weekend Update: Feb 26, 2012

Hard to believe that it is almost the end of February already but then I don’t have too much sense of time anymore with my current lifestyle and one of its many benefits. As they/we say here in Fiji “ne senga ne lenga” which translates into “don’t worry, be happy” and is truly a part of the culture, attitudes and way of life here in Fiji.  I can’t articulate it well but have come to understand it now after living here for almost a year in total between my two different times here and especially these past few months from working so closely with so many Fijians.  It has truly been one of the great gifts of my time here and a big bonus for doing all this boat work here to have the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with these happy people, to eat and joke with them and to be given this in depth glimpse into their lives and customs.  You know how it is when you work closely and spend a lot of time with someone, when you break bread with them and when you share in experiences, how you develop such a bond and understanding of people.  So far beyond anything you can get from a visit or a vacation and I’m so fortunate to have this opportunity.

The weather here has continued to cooperate as we have returned to the daily rhythm of bright sunny mornings followed by hot humid afternoons and then thunder and rain showers which typically start about 3pm or so.  Not a lot of rainfall when it does happen and so things have been staying very dry and all the work on the topsides of the hull has been progressing very well.

As you can see in these pictures it is a cycle of spraying on thick coats of primer/filler, sanding with large flat sanding pads to take down high spots and then filling in low spots with filler.  So Learnativity has lost its all white surface from the last round of spraying you saw last week and is now this beautiful patchwork of colours as we sand through the layers of primer and filler.  The goal is to have as flat and smooth a surface as possible before the dark blue colour top coat is sprayed on.  The agreement I have with the crew is that if we can feel it with our hands as we run them over the hull we fill and sand them till they are gone and if you look closely at the photo above left you can see each spot we find circled in pencil.  This also means that the large wavy irregularities in the steel plate will not be removed so it won’t be a perfect mirror flat surface but that isn’t reasonable or even possible with steel or most other hulls.  Going with dark blue does mean that any irregularities will be more easily seen, just as you’d be familiar with on car body panels and other dark glossy surfaces, but I think it will still look very distinctive and will truly be a whole new boat by the time we are done.

Once we have the topsides all painted our attention will move to the biggest job of all, the decks.  Unlike the nice large flat surfaces of the topsides, the deck is nothing but nooks and crannies that all have to be filled, fileted, sanded and primed so it takes much longer.  Then when we have this all done and sprayed with the topcoat of gloss white, I need to reinstall all the hardware, fittings, hatches, windows and rigging, as everything that wasn’t welded on was removed and now has to be replaced.  This includes chasing all threads for the new fasteners, cleaning and rebuilding all the parts and equipment before it is replaced and re-bedding and sealing it all so nothing leaks.  Then we will mask off the area around all these and apply the non skid surfaces.  All well worth it but all very time consuming and laborious

If you look closely at some of the photos here you can see that I got them to put me in a very nice spot and position such that the stern nestled right up into the tree branches.  Look a bit more closely in the photo top left with Ruby in it and you’ll see that the trees border a large grassy field and behind that is all verdant wild growth.  Birds fill the trees with song and I can still have my morning routine of breakfast out on the back deck looking out over this scene as I enjoy another sunrise and quiet start to a new day.  About as good as it can get for being “up on the hard” as we call it.  Best of all, this kind of experience will lead to an even deeper appreciation of all those times I am up on that nice new white non skid deck enjoying yet another great sundown and put a smile on my face every time I row up to Learnativity that can only be earned through this kind of effort and experience.

Not too much else to report as this work takes up all daylight hours along with many small jobs, researching and ordering new parts as well as time helping and talking with other cruisers here, trips to town for groceries and supplies and lots of writing and reading. I’d prefer to be back in the water and anchored peacefully of some remote island, but it is still a very rich and full life that I’m blessed to lead.

Stay tuned, with any luck I’ll have a nice shiny dark blue hull to show you next week.