A Boat Out Of Water - by Tom

If we put this boat in the water tomorrow, it would sink. That's a pretty good incentive to finish all the work that has to be done before we depart in mid June. Remedios wouldn't sink because it is an unsound boat, it would sink because we are working on the plumbing and one of the fittings that goes through the hull is being worked on by our ace plumber, Pat. While Pat is having fun working on plumbing, Rob and I have to do dumb stuff like drill holes in the deck, pick out some of the balsa core sandwich, fill the void with epoxy, then redrill the hole, then reassemble the fitting with goo leaving the fitting we just spent hours working on looking and functioning exactly the same as it did before we started. Here is a picture of Remedios on a stand inside its winter home at Barker's Island Marina in Duluth. Remedios is the big pointy boat in the middle of the picture, not the 14 foot runabout in the foreground...


Here's a picture of our deck and some of the boats around us. Some are sailboats and some are very big motorboats. There are lots of boats crammed in here, and Saturdays are filled with work noises and fiberglass odors as folks work on their boats. One guy has a nice big boombox (does anyone still use that term?) so we can all listen to his favorite radio station.

Here is something you hope you never see while sailing. This is the base where the bottom of the mast goes. The mast is that big tall stick thing that holds up the sails. I really thought that the mast base would be bigger and perhaps stronger-looking. But Pat says gravity does most of the work keeping the mast in place.

Here is another scary thing you don't get to see while sailing. This is the joint where the lead keel meets the fiberglass bottom of the boat. If you had a little toy boat that was too tippy, you could take a lead tire weight and bolt it to the bottom of your toy boat. The boat would be less tippy and the weight has the added bonus feature of being heavy enough to pull your little toy boat to the bottom of the pond if it got any water inside. Pat says that's gravity at work again. Does that joint look scary to you? Pat says that the bottom paint adheres to the keel and the boat very well, but it doesn't stick too well to that white sealant. He explained this to me and Rob yesterday and the two of us are thinking of sleeping on deck wearing our life jackets instead of deep down in our cabins. I like sailing catamarans. Cats have two hulls to keep from being tippy although they sure do tip over sometimes. But even when they tip over they don't have 16,000 pounds of lead trying to pull you straight to the bottom. Pat says the keel is our friend. Rob and I just hope it stays attached.