2023-10-05

Thursday, October 5

I woke up again feeling absolutely wrecked today. This shittorhhea is not ending.

Ever since I got this fiberglass quote I’ve just had a remarkably bad feeling about this project. The nuts and bolts of it is that it is a $16,000USD quote for 3 months, which in practical terms means I can’t do anything with the boat for 3 months and I’ve exhausted all of my residual income on it.

This obviously isn’t feasible. Whilst I could probably make the money work by the end of it all I’ll have is a nice hull. I was essentially ready to kill the project at this point, or at least defer it for a much longer time. Instead of making any rash calls I went for a very long walk and thought it through, and here is what I came up with.

• I don’t care about a nice deck, but I do need a “structurally sound” deck.
• I also need a waterproof deck.
• I’m much happier to live ultra-minimally on a “liveable” boat rather than having a beautiful deck.

I spoke to smithy about this plan in general and he said it sounded correct, but I am still shooting in the dark here and was worrying that it was all for naught. As they say - the best laid plans are laid to waste.

I went and caught up with Juan about this at night and he agreed. He had some insight into this and said that has seen lots of projects fail because people come in and rip everything apart, and then they have a $100k boat in pieces with nothing to show for it. He also clarified that what I’m really looking for is “usage” or “utility” of the boat and he is 100% correct.

What this means going forward in concrete terms is the following:

• get the deck structurally sound by replacing the support beams/members underneath.
• paint over the entire fucking thing with epoxy to waterproof the bitch
• in parallel - start grinding and cleaning all of the shit out from internally within the boat.
• paint the cunt white in bilge paint (or whatever) internally.

At this point I’ll have a water tight hull and a nice, bright watertight interior. This means I can then start doing things with this boat, like (for example):

• sail it out to Taboga island for a night.
  • I’ll bring water, beer and meat in a cooler, and a charcoal grill to cook that shit above deck.
  • It’s a simple 1 hour trip away.
  • I’ll stay there over night.
  • I’ll head back
• equip the boat internally with a hammock so I can sleep there
• put a table and lounge in there so I can work
• wire up some extra batteries, solar panels and an inverter so I have power for my laptop and phone.

This is definitely the correct way to do this. Whilst the old gal wont be pretty on the outside, she’ll be beautiful on the inside and thats all I need at the moment. This also means I can begin to outfit all of the primary boat systems before I finally replace the deck.

To say I am excited about this new course of action is an absolute understatement.