Friday, November 25, 2016

Out of the Yard

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Just needs to have the blue tape at the waterline removed and she’s ready to splash. That’s US$475 blue paint and primer, aka 4 top coats and 16 liters.
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This is Brian putting on Propspeed to the running gear (the metal prop, shaft and strut). Propspeed is a yellow chromate metal primer topped with a clear silicon paint. Basically nothing sticks to the slick silicon keeping the busy barnacles at bay.
It’s nice to be in the water not risking my life each time I use the ladder to get in and out of the boat and to get out of the dusty yard.
Now its time to work on getting the mast back in the boat. Hopefully next week.
Paul

Monday, November 21, 2016

2016-2017 World Apology Tour

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I’m a news junky. While up in Bellingham I had an unlimited, very large Web connection pipe. Fast enough that if I had stayed just a few more weeks I would have been done with all of Netflix. With all that I was getting a little overwhelmed with too much news of the repugnant election. So I was looking forward to getting away from all that and working on getting the boat ready to restart cruising. I ‘m calling this year’s cruise the 2016-2017 World Apology Tour. Not sure if we should sell t-shirts yet.
When I arrived at the boat from the airport and the ladder that was there when I left was missing. I wandered over to the yard office and the crew was on a tea break. Karl and Shane gave me hardy Kiwi welcome back, then the first comment was So how’s Mr. Trump. Guess you can’t get away from it.
The pic above shows coat #1 of the blue bottom paint. Two more to go.
Paul

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Back in Kiwi Land

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After almost 5 months enjoying Ferndale (Bellingham, WA) it was time to head back to New Zealand. Chris is still working in Tanzania on setting up education changes for mid-wives covering preventing maternal to infant HIV transmission. She won’t be down in NZ till Dec. I headed to Vancouver, Canada for the Air New Zealand flight. Since I only had a one-way ticket, Air NZ needed to get confirmation from NZ immigration before they’d let me fly. I had a copy of the boat Kiwi Customs paperwork, but that wasn’t enough. After a pleasant conversation with Kiwi Immigration they decided to let me fly. Four movies latter and a few hours of sleep I arrived at what they told me was 5:30am in Auckland. I made the mistake of checking Yes on the arrival form over hiking gear. That put in onto the W-bench where they took my hiking boots into the back room for a complimentary wash and fumigation. Returning them in a sealed bag.
Fortunately our friends Art and Nancie (Nordic 44 Secondwind) were flying out on the 9am flight back to Vancouver and on to Seattle. We met up for a good coffee (In Kiwi talk I had a Flat White). They gave me their car to use while they are gone, making it pretty easy to do the 2 hour drive up to Whangarei. All I had to do is keep yelling at myself on the drive: Stay left, young man! Stay left! If you are a foreign driver in New Zealand you are allowed to use either your turn signals or your windshield wipers to indicate a lane change or a turn. Turns out you can’t use your turn signals when it starts to rain.
On the upper picture you can see that the earth quake didn’t knock Georgia over. It was actually primarily on the South Island with some damage on the lower North Island in Wellington. I had a local painter (Simon SK Painting) repaint the blue and white boot stripe while I was gone. He did a thorough job, but ended up billing me 40% over his estimate. Oh well.
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Now its time to get the bottom paint on. I decided to start with a primer tie-coat (Altex Primashield). This should give a good base to cover the old Petit soft paint with Altex Carboline 3000 (same as Altex #5). The tie-coat went on pretty quickly and dries really fast.
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Oh yea, a gratuitous picture of Quinn hanging with gramps.
Time to go paint a coat of bottom paint.
Paul

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Alt Reality


I've lived in this country for over 60 years. Yea, I know Older Than Dirt. I thought I knew the place pretty well. I've read a newspaper almost everyday of my adult life. I've lived in Florida, California, Oregon and Washington. I grew up in Florida when Florida was really part of the South. I drank from the Whites Only drinking fountain when I went to the grocery store with my Mom. I saw blacks attacked with thrown soda bottles from speeding passing vehicles because they were black. School integration occurred for me beginning in junior high school extending into high school, where police at the corners of classroom buildings were needed on occasion. I remember when Roe v. Wade became the the law of the land. I remember working in the defense industry where they took women engineers resumes for job applicants and threw them directly in the trash. Chris remembers high school friends being thrown out of school, pregnant because birth control was not available to them and illegal abortions were killing American women. She remembers having to join the boys sports teams in high school, before Title 9 was passed, expanding girls access to public school programs including physical education.

I really thought that those were mostly long gone days. Wow, I feel like I am now in an alternate reality.  How anyone could overlook the racism, bigotry, misogyny, policy shallowness and glaring contradictions of our president-elect is beyond me. These people apparently dream of going back to the good old days of the 1950's, when taxes were high, racism was the law, women's rights were still under male control, and government subsidies for education and housing mortgages, not capitalism, drove the economy and national growth.

While the popular vote is close, it appears that the president elect didn't actually win the popular vote. Even without that, it is still a mandate. The Senate, House and soon the Supreme Court are all heavily weighted to one side. Its a mandate. Can the president elect deliver for his followers his promises: deport 11 million immigrants in a 100 days; build the Mexican border wall and force Mexico to pay for it, get rid of the EPA, get rid of the Affordable Healthcare Act, aka Obamacare, and replace it with something so much better, cherish women, ban Muslims, ban Syrians refugees, prosecute Hillary Clinton and throw her in jail, cut the NASA budget, bomb the shit out of ISIS, bring back waterboarding, renegotiate the Iran deal,  bring back jobs from China, Mexico, Japan, etc, force Nabisco to make Oreo cookies in the US, grow the economy 6% annually,  cut the deficit by $18 trillion, renegotiate the budget to get a 20% discount, get rid of banking regulations and consumer protection laws, cut taxes on the rich, get rid of corporate tax loopholes, fix the mental health system to stop mass shootings, allow concealed carry in all 50 states while enforcing a 5 year minimum sentence for committing a crime with a gun, provide more money for drug addiction treatment.............


Its a mandate, can you deliver or will the people that voted for the president elect look like the picture above along with the rest of us.

I guess I feel like I should just jump on a boat and sail off into the great blue ----------

Paul