Kai O'hana
09/20/06 - Moving
Onto the Boat
-A word from Captain Bach.
By October first, we were on the backside of the hurricane season, and if we could hold out 2 more months, we’d be home free. September is notoriously the worst month of the season (at least in the Leewards) so we were glad to see this month pass with hardly a single event in the Atlantic, much less the Caribbean. We continued to hope for the best, and made plans just in case.
Our original scheme was to take Kai Ohana to Anse Marcel (the Island’s only true hurricane hole) if a storm appeared to be bearing down on us. In May the port captain said we did not need reservations because he did not think the marina would be full, and then he turned around and leased every last slip in the lagoon to a charter company. With that option exhausted, I asked the owner of the yard where we were tied to the seawall if he would pull us out and put our keel in a hole on the hard if the island ended up in the sights of a hurricane. He said he had ten regular clients that he had committed to do just that and he hadn’t the room for us. I told him my only other option was to take her out into the middle of the lagoon and throw out as much “hardware” (anchor and chain) I could get my hands on and pray. He just shook his head, and said, “Pity, all that money.” The guys in the yard (our other family), however, said they were the ones that stacked the boats and they’d get us in. I hoped I would not have to put them to the test.
As the last weekend in September approached, we packed up the condo and moved our stuff to the boatyard. At the last minute, however, we got cold feet and asked Tommy Taylor, our landlord, if we could stay another month. He apologized profusely as he told us he had already leased the place for a year, but he felt so bad that we were moving onto the boat (literally a floating construction site in a boatyard) that he arranged to find us somewhere else to stay. You see, not only had he visited us in the yard, he also worked with us on the boat for several days “just for fun.” He wasn’t too concerned about the guys living on the boat, but he couldn’t imagine it would be very much fun for the ladies. We decided to bite the bullet and get on the boat anyway, ready or not.
Tracy, Preston, Sara and Alexis focused on cleaning, sanding, varnishing and painting their rooms, and then re-cleaning, sanding varnishing and painting, and then re-cleaning, sanding and varnishing, painting… while I focused on rebuilding the galley. As with any immense renovation project, the surprises were abundant. Tracy’s cabin turned out to be the most intact room in the whole boat (mainly because there were no leaking chain plates outside her bulwarks). The lack of damage in her room was indeed a big surprise, but Preston’s cabin (in the forepeak or foc’sle) that shares a bulkhead with Sara’s and Alexis’ cabin (which will ultimately be divided for everyone’s sanity) revealed all kinds of nasty things once the paneling was pulled off the walls: mainly some intricate forms of fungus and the few surviving colonies of termites that managed to find some wood that had not been slathered liberally with thinned-down epoxy and two-part polyurethane.
Sara lost it. The bugs were more than she could bear. She’d wake up in the kind of funk you could only be in if you’d been wrestling a bear all night and complain to anyone who would listen (we all had our own issues to be too concerned with hers) that the termites had been biting her all night. I explained to her that we had killed all the termites, or at least encapsulated them for eternity in their epoxied tomb, and even if we hadn’t, termites don’t eat people unless they’re a particular storybook character. She would have none of it though; she’d sleep out on the deck, on the floor, in Tracy’s cabin, in the salon or anywhere but on her plastic covered mattress until she realized she was being bitten everywhere she went. That’s the way it is in a boatyard that’s in the tropics during the hurricane season, and the mosquitoes outnumber their prey thousands to one.
I had my share of bug misery as well. During the winter St. Martin is blessed with what they call “the Christmas Winds” – 17 to 25 knot northeasterly trade winds. Now you might be thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of wind.” And it is when you are trying to work outside while constantly being buffeted by the roaring, ceaseless onslaught, but it’s a blessing in disguise. When you are in a boat on the water, even a few feet from the seawall, the winds are too strong for even the most adventurous mosquitoes to tackle the flight to your boat, but in the summer when there can be days with hardly a ripple on the lagoon and you are anywhere near the boatyard, you prepare yourself to be devoured alive.
So needless to say, my first few nights on the boat were miserable as well. Not only did we go from a king size bed to a double (with a corner – my corner – at the feet shaved off to fit the shape of the boat), we went from a large ceiling fan centered over the bed to a tiny oscillating one on the wall. The mosquitoes would drive me under cover (Lauren is cold-natured anyway and she slept comfortably buried under the sheets all night), yet the heat would drive me back out into the open like a sacrificial cow to the awaiting bloodthirsty throng. In five nights I may have gotten ten hours of sleep, which seemed to be just the perfect amount for the cellulitis to develop that had unknowingly entered my right shin, yet lay dormant for a month.
I seem to be susceptible to these weird tropical bacteria when traveling or living where these creatures lie in waiting. I contracted staff infection in 1994 while on a “surfari” in Baja, Mexico, and though cellulitis is different than staff, it is no less painful. Staff infection (or Staphylococcus) creates large boils where the infection enters a small wound (a scratched “no-see-um” bite – the bug du jour in the backwaters of La Paz) and when these volcanoes on your skin erupt (which for me was always in the middle of the night with a full bladder while groping for the light on the bathroom wall) it is so painful that everyone in the county knows something is terribly wrong with someone. Cellulitis, on the other hand, is an infection that enters through a small wound (a scratched mosquito bite) and infects the tissues between the outer layer of skin and the muscle. It becomes inflamed and the surrounding area swells with such intensity that you think your infected limb is going to burst, and again, the pain endured while groping for the bathroom light in the middle of the night or doing anything else is excruciating.
Now I’m not one much for visiting doctors or taking medicine so I’m sure Lauren was quite surprised when she woke up one morning and I was already out of bed and dressed in my finest pair of shorts, tank top and flip flops and telling her I was heading for the doc first thing. After an hour in the waiting room, the Dutch doctor took one look at my leg and said, “Zhou’ve got zhellulites.” Within minutes, I was hobbling across the road to a pharmacy for antibiotics and then back to the boatyard $40 lighter (compare that to a doctor’s visit and a four-day prescription of antibiotics in the states).
Once again, my friend and boat broker, Tony Brewer, pulled through and offered his garden apartment to me for 4 days. I was back to sleeping in a large bed under a large ceiling fan (air conditioning if I chose) and only pestered by a very manageable number of mosquitoes. When I wasn’t sleeping 12 hours a night, I used the “down-time” to lay on the couch with my leg over my head and finished designing the rig for the boat. I had needed to take the time to do that; it’s funny how things work out sometimes.
Back on my feet and back in the galley, I had to replace many of the rotten frames and ceiling beams, then waterproof the leaking dorados, then panel the walls, then build the port cabinet (the one with the refrigerator, the freezer AND the stove, which might be
akin to trying to stuff a hippo in a taxi) and installing the rest of the cabinets in the galley. Right in the middle of this project (never is the right time to leave a project), I scheduled a trip to the states to procure the boat’s spars (masts, booms, gaffs, yards, bowsprit – 12 in all), three and a half kilometers of rope, over half a kilometer of wire, blocks and many other necessary items, and I arranged to have it all delivered to St. Martin. While I was there, I also had the pleasure of finishing my tax returns – one of my most all-time favorite activities. During the week I was gone, Chad and Preston finished the installation of the stove and sink in the galley, and by the time I returned, Lauren was well on her way to getting the galley wired (in the sense of consistently turning out incredible food for the terminally famished crew.)
While working on the galley, I also pushed to get our “Hillbilly Shower” constructed. This consisted of 2 plywood walls (one with a door) built in the corner between the entrance of the workshop and the container. For the showerhead, we threw a hose over one of the walls and screwed a shut-off valve and a little garden spray nozzle on the end. The floor of the shower stall is a stainless steel pan with a wood grate cover that came out of the boat. It drains under the wood floor into a grass-filled hole downwind of the shed’s entrance -- “downwind” is the key word here as we’ve labeled our makeshift (and not terribly efficient) natural plant-filtration gray water septic system “The Bog of Eternal Stench” Ah, life in a boatyard…
Chad worked exclusively on getting one head and the galley operational prior to us moving in, which he did in his usual self-managed, 12-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week style. The plumbing entailed hooking up the gray water tank for the sink waste, hand pumping the black water directly over the side, a saltwater feed to the toilet (that the Cap’n has dubbed “The Thimble”) from the “sea chest” (that Daniel describes as “Jacque Cousteau TV” that he watches in the engine room), hooking up the six “freshwater” (non-potable) tanks, running all the plumbing to and fro everything, and because gravity has nothing to do with anything in a boat, installing the pumps for the “in and up” and the pumps for the “down and out”.
All of this pumping takes energy, and its no fun doing anything in the dark nor is it very safe to burn lanterns or candles in 44-year-old wooden boats, so Chad was also immersed in running wire through conduit, hooking this wire up to that, hiding distribution panels here and there, and installing one switchboard for the AC power and another one for the DC power. He’s had to deal with 120 volts for all the stuff we’re used to using, 12 volts for all the other boat stuff, and 24 volts for the engine and windlass. And of course, all this stuff has to be metered and monitored and measured so we’ve got all kinds of new flashy things to switch on and off and watch when we are bored and have nothing better to do.
