September 12, 2020 Varnish-Paint-Programming

wingssail images-judy jensen
Varnishing in the Galley

Since many of our normal summer activities are off the table this year we’ve turned to boat projects to fill the time.

That’s not unusual; summertime is when we usually catch up on “the list” but this year is different, of course. It’s Covid-19. Because of Covid-19 we’re for the most part stay-at-homes (as is almost everyone around the world I guess) so we have an opportunity to do more boat work. We started off the summer with a pretty long list and we’ve been going at it for a couple of months. Now I’m over it, I just don’t want to anymore.

I’m like the little kid, “Mom, there’s nothing to do.”

Of course there is plenty to do, but I’m inherently lazy. Nothing on the list strikes my fancy. The easy things, or the fun things, or the things we just couldn’t avoid, they’re already done. Now we’re down to the ones we don’t want to tackle. It’s easier to take a nap or look at the Internet than to start sanding on the teak trim.

I’ve got a brother-in-law who has more ambition in his little thumb than I have in my whole body. When he gets bored he remodels a house somewhere.

Me? Not so much. I’m not as industrious as him and I know it.

So I’m guilt ridden, and therefore I force myself. Each morning I wake up and start to think, “What productive thing will I do today? What item on the boat project list can I do?” I review the project plan, as I have done 100 times, searching for that unfinished item that looks easy.

It’s only mid-September, we still have at least a month and a half of boat project days left. Oh God, if it is tough to find something today what will it be like in October?

But the good news is that we’ve got a lot already done.

Last week we (Judy) varnished the galley (I helped by opening the can of varnish thinner). I refinished a bulkhead which had water damage and peeling paint which involved removing and then reinstalling the water maker. So I sanded and repaired and painted, and since the water maker was off, I rebuilt that.

Then I caught up on my log book project. We’ve had an ongoing project for years to digitize our paper log book but we were behind in it. The last trip we’d put online was in July 2019 so there was a year of trips to catch up on, plus I wanted to update the index for all of our blog posts as well as the log. This is truly a project just for ourselves. The log book is part of our online blog and anyone can view it but to everyone in the world but us it is a boring piece of trivia. But for us however (or me anyhow) it is a labor of love.

wingssail images
Log Page for Dec 12, 2019

We sailed a brilliant race that day

Google Blogspot made it tougher by changing the user interface and I needed to do some HTML programming and a lot of excel spreadsheet manipulation. That actually made it a fun project because I like programming, and it also had a deadline since Google has announced that the UI was going to be changed again on September 1 and the upcoming change would make my index updates impossible. But I got it accomplished and now we are completely up to date on the Wings Log Book Pages. 1497 separate trips on Wings are recorded and posted online along with several indexes such as location, date, significant events, mechanical breakdowns and maintenance, and even who was on board. If you have sailed on Wings your name is in the index, how many times you’ve been on board, and what each of the trips were, as well as your shipmates. This goes back to 1986. What fun it is to look back on some of those early years and see where we went and who came with us (and to see what broke and how we fixed it).

Now I’m working on fixing our car. Mostly, that means taking it to various shops to get one thing or another done. When you are trying to keep a 19 year old car in good condition this is required,

As for the rest of our boat projects? We have more boat painting to do, and some water tank work to finish, and several broken boat parts to repair or replace, and so the list goes on.

Writing this blog entry was one of the items on my list, and now I can cross that off.

Click here for a couple more photos.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, La Cruz Huanacaxtle, Mexico