If You Can't Say Something Nice...

So I haven't said anything at all for a while.  What can I say? We've been feeling a bit crushed lately.  Since we hired Danny to get us back on the fast track 7 weeks ago, he's barely touched our boat. Managed to do 4 other boats in the yard and others elsewhere, but rarely shows up to do ours.   The cabin is painted, the deck holes are patched, but the deck isn't painted, and the engine room remains untouched. We've both spent weeks in there rolling around in glass dust and inhaling the offense.  AJ even won a trip to the ER after getting steel shards in his eye from grinding in there. We were tapped out with the engine room, which I like to refer to as 'the pit of despair.'

There were some weather set backs; we got a couple hard days of rain from Isaac fallout, and many rainy afternoons, but not too much in August. I had two near heat strokes though, which made me feel utterly defeated. What can you do when working on the boat nearly kills you? If it's not toxic chemicals causing asthma attacks, or contorted positions causing muscle spasms that lay you out for a day, it's the climate. Heat sickness did't feel like what I expected.   It sneaks up quick. All the sudden the sweat started pouring down my face as if I had a water hose on my head. It felt like my body was expelling all fluids as fast as it could.  My throat went completely dry and started to swell closed.  Then came the shakes.  My hand shook so violently when I tried to hold a water bottle that AJ had to hold it for me. There was no pain, quite the opposite. I felt like I was in an opiate coma. I couldn't feel anything.  The point when I knew for certain something was terribly wrong was when I stopped being able to talk.  Most attempts failed and only slurred nonsense was uttered when successful.   I laid motionless in a cold room in that strange waking dream state for about 4 hours before I was able to move around or talk again.  The inability to move was crazy.  Just trying to lift an arm caused my heart to race harder than it ever has.  It was alarmingly impossible to roll over or stand.  That happened twice in one week, after being in the 11+ UV rated August sun for only an hour.  I was feeling pretty angry and hopeless after that.  I hate August.  Hibernation is about all it's good for.  The French have it right. They shut down the entire country and take the month off.  Which is pretty much what we had to do.  But, we had hired Danny's Boat Restoration so the month would not be entirely lost. But alas, it mostly was anyway.  We got to the point of calculating how much money we could wring out of scrapping the keel for lead and the hardware for bronze, throwing in the towel, and walking away, far far away from here.  But, we are so close. Painfully close.  We already have everything we need to finish.  We just have to put everything back together again and install systems.

We arrived to move aboard one year ago last September.  By the time we were approaching the one year anniversary without having sailed we were getting depressed.  We started stranded on the mooring ball with a broken engine,  which is where we were the happiest.  Perhaps because it was the beginning. But I think it was because we were out on the water.  The daily exercise required for life and the privacy suited us.  Then we got jobs, got towed to the dock, and lost our privacy and momentum. The other docked boats, (and the marina) didn't care for the eyesore that was our boat, or the noisiness of boat work, so our moods began to slip.  New hope came when we hauled out to finally make the boat a functioning mobile home.  That hope was getting dashed by August.  But, September is bringing renewed hope and motivation with our new living situation.   We had to move off the boat when we hauled out.  We stayed in an acquaintances spare room for a couple months until that situation expired, then moved to a hotel, which we could not afford for long.  The hotel was nice at first - a room all our own, but soon the financial stress soon required a total reassessment of our situation.  I Wish we had known the haul out was going to take 6 months! I scoured Craig's list for options.  What we ended up finding was unexpectedly perfect.  A little vacation rental (no lease - fully furnished) studio apartment with an outdoor patio big enough for projects and a dock for our boat. Much better and cheaper than a shady weekly hotel.  It's still the off season with the off season prices.  Amazing.  As soon as Danny is finished we will drop the engine in and move the boat here, where we can work on it from home! It will literally be in our back yard.  Which will mean working so much faster and no more heat stroking.  A/C and a shower will be a couple feet away at all times.  Being in a home situation for the first time in 18 months (since AJ got out of the Army and we left Germany) alleviates so much stress.  I didn't realize just how stressful our living situations have been until we moved into a real apartment of our own.  Homelessness wears on you after a while.  Now we have some privacy, a kitchen to cook in, and the ability to have all our stuff in one place. Our things have been scattered between a shed, a storage unit, a shop, and piled up under the boat. We can finally consolidate and organize our lives.  It's a new chapter.  I'm not sure what we've been trying to prove to ourselves, but maybe a home base is necessary to stay sane through all this after all.  All we gotta do now is get Danny to finish and get off the hard and into our back yard.
           
We've not been entirely useless lately, just mostly. We made the panels to separate the cockpit lockers from the engine room. Fiberglass cloth epoxied on Meranti Mahogany plywood.  And we've been doing other odd projects getting ready for reassembly.

           
Can't do an epoxy job without the sacrifice of one little critter.  The dinghy took one unlucky moth. This time we came back to find this little guy, DOA.

I'll wrap up with some pictures of something prettier than epoxy or metal scraps for once. We took a little day trip down to Miami to get out of town and shake off the Blues a few weeks ago.  There we got to see a little Old World in the New World at Villa Vizcaya.
           

                             It was a little like being back in Europe.  Venice with Palm Trees.

 A lovely place to walk in the rain.

                                                

Gardens

And the fantastic beautiful Banyan Tree