Thursday, April 5, 2007

Boat magic


It's a strange thing.
A boat has the ability to change its size.
When you buy it, it is just right, when you work on it, it is big, when you need to paint it, it is too big.
When you get her out to sea she is perfect,
when you get her out of sight of land she starts to shrink,when the sea starts to build she gets realy small.
The nice thing about "Boat magic" is that if you take care of her she WILL take care of you.
Hi I'm Terrie's husband Robert.
This is a shot of her the last time we hauled her, going back into the water. What you see is the product of 18 months of hard work and the decks are not done yet. During this haul out I gutted the after "cavern" the reason I say cavern is because a "cabin" is too small to define the space.
you don't understand until you rebuild it, boat magic. The layout that was in there when we bought her was not working for us and I had much work to do to her hull in this area. Previous neglect had made her weak.I cut out an area 4 feet tall 6 feet long and 4 frames that had rusted to the point that I was afraid to touch when she was in the water. After repairing the hull, stripping all the paint, repainting, and rewiring we put her back in the water.
Hey remember that Boat magic, the hull of Wahine is galvanized,when she was built, before the paint they flame applied zinc to the entire hull. We stripped her by hand, sandblasting would have removed all of that protection. She was built in 1963, that's 44 years, it's still working so I ain't fixing it. The boat grew as we stripped her by hand, Boat magic.

2 comments:

oreneta said...

She is really so lovely isn't she....Oreneta feels pretty darn big when we're sanding the bottom. I cannot fathom doing Wahine!!! It's hard to imagine her feeling small, but there would be times...

you both write so well, Terrie, your last post was so funny, and this reings so so so true.

Love it.

Terrie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.