All the pictures I see of our boat I can't help but thinking she looks so rough. Really hard done by and the type of boat most people would look at and wonder why anyone would buy it.
All these years while we dreamed of living on a sailboat and spent hours perusing the for sale boats, we'd see the gorgeous boats, smooth and shiny fiberglass hulls, sparkling steel dodgers, clean sails, beautiful teak work interiors, comfy cabins and roomy salons. I look at our 30 year old, home made trimaran that has been damaged detrimentaly more than once and oddly enough, she looks great to me.
Not saying I don't feel a pang of envy when I walk past the brand new 45 foot benetau down the dock from us but, Sweets is ours. With her chipped paint and soft spot on the deck, her dinged walls and leaky hatches, she's old and damaged, not the prettiest boat in the marina but she's ours. And that makes her special.
When I look at her and see how much work there is to be done I have many doubts about whether we will ever get her to the point where we could live in her, actually feel homey. She's so small comparatively speaking. She's 40 feet long and has a 24 foot beam, 24 foot beam! That must be so roomy, not so. Most of that width is taken up by unlivable ama space and two akas which is livable but only 3 feet high so more like sleepable space. That leaves the main hull, the vaka as our primary living space, and that only has an 11 foot beam, pretty tiny. Not to mention anyone over 5'7 needs to duck to stand up in the head.
Was this the boat I dreamed of living in? No, but that doesn't make it a deal breaker. It'd be nice to downsize and have less needless stuff around, the smaller the boat the less area I need to clean, the kids are still under 4 feet so ceiling height doesn't matter to them and Mark and I who are both 5'8, don't mind ducking. Do I wish we had a shower actually inside the boat? Yes. Do I wish we had pretty wood all shiny and nice? Of course. Do I wish we had the pretty boat that everyone else walks by and feels that pang of envy too? Sure. But we are very good at seeing the potential and I am leaning heavily the faith in our ability to see the potential in his huge fixer upper.
Mark is less worried about our ability to make Sweets a nice boat to live on then I am, and I suppose that is comforting, he has plunged right back into the mountain of projects.
We,ve been having a devil of a time trying to get the hatches and windows at least decently water tight, appearantly that is mission impossible on a boat. Certainly a boat that just has holes cut in the sides with a layer of plexiglass screwed over it.
When we first brought her home, we took all the hatches/windows off and resealed them with silicone and cleaned them all up. This fixed about 80% of the leakage but this window in the starboard aka leaked even worse! sieve-like.
So here is attempt #2 to seal her up. We've removed the plexiglass again, scraped off all the old silicone and sealed around the edges with epoxy putty.
Now on to adhering it back to the boat. We ordered special glue that is used to hold fish tanks and skyscrapers together also some heavy duty butyl tape, if this concotion doesn't keep the water out, nothing will. So here's hoping.
This picture here shows our first 100% completed project. This is the deck iron that the wood stove smoke pipe is attached to, and there is is with a bung to cap it off while not use. Done.
Here is the damaged area in the port side aka, the boys cabin. The hole in the floor has been fixed and now on to the window, oddly enough, this window doesn't leak, but you can see the white parts was the original wood and the bare wood is the new stuff from when it was fixed. Now comes trying to extend the trim around the window as it was in the original design. Basically this is finishing work but this is the last major carpentry work being done inside which means when it is done we can paint! Oh my goodness I can't even tell you how excited I am to paint, it's not pretty, varnished teak but crisp, fresh, white will be just as pretty to me.
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