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The work begins...
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All the next week we prepared the Amazon for her trip to the boatyard where we had planned on changing the thruhulls, painting the bottom and most importantly stopping the rust creeping through her bilges. Every day after work we cleaned, took gear off the Amazon and developed our plan of attack.
Even though we tried to ignore it, each day our hearts fell a little bit, as we realized how much work we had ahead of us to get her into bluewater shape. Adding water tanks, solar panels, upgrading her meager electronics, changing her windows from glass to a stronger synthetic material, adding storage space…the list seemed to grow each day. We suddenly found ourselves torn between a year of fixing this boat up, and two more years of working to pay off our dream boat, the Jenny P.
That Friday afternoon, sun had heated up the boat like a greenhouse as it streamed through the large windows. Sweaty and tired from trying to take apart the v-berth in our attempts to access the hull to plan out our reinforcement strategy, we discovered one of the boat’s stringers had come unwelded, probably during our pounding trip home since it had been fine before. We tried taking all the wood out of the v-berth area, but found it attached with glue and rusty tacks. It would not come out; we’d either have to cut it out or leave it in and sadly realized the rest of the boat’s interior was put together this way as well. We had planned on taking the interior apart in order to clean and anti-rust paint the hull and knew this was not going to be unless we wanted to rebuild the interior.
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Home is where the, uh, cat is.
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Earlier that week, we had found a piece of paper that had mysteriously been kept on the boat with one of the previous owner’s phone number on it. It also happened this fellow had bid on the Amazon when we did, but we beat him to it. We locked the Amazon, called the number and to our amazement, he said sure – he’d love to buy the boat. We’d been saved.
So, two months later, we’re back to where we started. After watching rust streaks run down the side of the Amazon’s freshly painted topsides, rust bubble underneath the white paint, her bilge being eaten by rust -- we have come to love our low-maintenance fiberglass boat even more.
More importantly, we realized that if we could go back in time to when we were first boat shopping, we would probably get a more economical boat than we did. But at this point, it would take us just as much time and money to fix up a cheaper old boat than we have left to pay on Jenny P. Plus, she is home.
We’ll just have to keep her varnish up and hope it blinds the pirates should they attempt to attack. Boy, it’s fun to worry about stuff like this.
-sdj-
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