Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Messy Boat Means Progress, Right?

Our forward head is a storage closed for our boat cushions.
I am sitting here in my sister's hotel room while Isla naps, relishing in the relative peace and calm for another hour before we go back to the boat.  My sister left early this morning (sad face) after what was a positively wonderful visit, and now I am taking advantage of her room for a couple of hours until check out time.  You see, our boat is about to become a construction zone.  Again.

There is no such thing as an "easy" project on a boat.  In fact, if anyone tells you anything will be "a piece of cake" when it comes to work on your boat, I'd be leery.  The current "little" project that has morphed into something else entirely involves our stays'l.  It's 95% complete:  the inner stay is on and the pretty new sail is tightly furled around it but what we are waiting on are the car tracks for the new sheets.  They need to be mounted to the deck.  This was a "simple" and "straightforward" job that our rigger said would take a "couple of hours", at most.

Wrong-o.

Turns out we need to mount the tracks on a part of the deck that is not accessible from the inside of our boat without removing some cabinetry.  So we made a call to our woodworker guy, the same guy who fixed the wet core on our deck, and he is now on the boat with loud tools removing paneling so we can see what we're working with.  To do this we had to remove everything from all the cabinets and lockers in our salon area.  As such, the boat is out of sorts right now.  Call it OCD, call it being a neat-freak, call it what you will - but I am one of those people who respond to their environment.  If the boat's a total mess, so am I.   I feel stressed, I feel flustered, and I get overwhelmed.  I just want to tidy everything up and make it livable again and the fact that I can't has me on edge.  Ridiculous, I know,  but what can I say?  It's who I am.  I will never be the kind of person who can live full-time in a construction zone.  I know what you are thinking "cry me a river, Brittany"...I am not looking for sympathy because - let's face it - this is not a big deal at all.  I'm just telling it like it is (for me), because, well,  that's what I do.

In other news, Scott and I have come up with (yet another) master list of things to get finished before we shove off for the Bahamas (hopefully at the end of the month).  Not gonna lie, there's a lot on there and sometimes we wonder if it will ever end.  Then we remember that we live on a boat and that it will not, in fact, end.  But that is okay because at the end of the day, we live on a boat.  Our problems are of the "first world" variety.

In the meantime, I just need to keep reminding myself that a messy boat means "progress" and keep my urge to put things away at bay.

4 comments:

Andi of My Beautiful Adventures said...

Good luck with your project!

Petr & Jana said...

One has to wonder what did the designers/manufacturers think about when they designed our boats.
On our boat, we have to remove the cabinetry even when we want to check our chainplates.
Stay positive, it will be over soon (sic) :)

Keep Reaching said...

What a contrast between this post and the last one - putting on the Boom Boat Name was relatively painless and ended up in a great-looking, but totally cosmetic result. The staysail project is a total pain in the rear and totally functional (well, staysails can be pretty also).

Clark said...

That's why there are no stays or cabinets on my Sunfish, along with many other things :) anyway, great blog and great adventure, thanks for sharing!

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