Kai O'hana
04/27/07 - Working Below Decks
-Letter from Lauren
There is one thing for sure on a boat: if you have to work on anything, it will create all kinds of messes that affect practically the entire boat. The galley is a good example of this in that I had nowhere to put the food items while the shelves where being made. The canned items seem to multiply on their own, and no matter where I turned there was something always on the counter tops that I had just cleared. So I just gave up after I learned I could take my longest cutting board and put it over the sink to create a temporary work area to prepare our meals.
After getting used to the professional kitchen Craig designed and built for me in the Flint Rock farmhouse, I knew he was up for a challenge in designing this tiny (in comparison) boat galley. But in the end I knew his design, though small, would be no exception in its functionality. It was just a matter of me being patient, which is not exactly one of my strong suits.
In order for Tracy to complete the cabinets, she first had to fix the wood rot on the bulkhead near the washer. Being that it was by the stairs, she had to deal with everyone’s comings and goings, which further slowed her progress. But the work got finished eventually and every new addition was a cause for celebration big or small. For example, the veggie sink was installed with ooohs and aaahs and even though it was not hooked up to the plumbing, it was still one-step closer to a completed galley.
The one project that made serious headway was Preston’s cabin (the crew quarters in the foc’sle or the “The Bachelor’s Pad” as it was becoming known as). Because he wasn’t concerned with endless brightwork in his cabin (instead he opted for beautifully painted white walls accented with a touch of color here and there) he was finished with it in record time. He removed the rusted steel ladder, and he and Daniel redesigned a new one out of stainless steel and teak. The best part was he could move it for a side entry out his hatch or out the back if he ever decided to replace his hatch with a different design. Being able to go forward to play his music and be undisturbed with the bulkhead between himself and his sisters, his whole disposition changed when he moved into his own cabin.
So as projects’ epoxy, paint or varnish on the exterior or in the galley where drying, the girls would steal a moment or two to work on their cabins. Tracy was the first to sand and varnish her cabin, as it needed the least amount of structural or cosmetic repair. Sara and Alexis worked on the wood rot that was in the cabin that they shared. Every time there was any work to be done in a cabin, the mattresses would have to be removed, put on deck (crammed into the salon in a panic if it rained) and then put back in their cabins in the evening. As you can imagine, this process got old fast, especially at the end of physically challenging day, but it did motivate everyone to not tarry with their cabin’s projects.
The closet near the girl’s rooms had the only full length mirror available to all the women on the boat, and being that most of them were teenagers, this was an especially important item to have on board. So despite the captain’s orders to finish the more important projects on the schedule first, Sara made sure that the door it was attached to had a nice finish on it, and that it was installed posthaste.
The girls, also tired of sharing the only head with everyone else, cleared it of their treasures so Chad could get in there to install and plumb the toilet. Yes! Another moment of celebration, we now had two working heads. The greatest two things for women on a boat are a working toilets and running water.
As Chad was installing the isolation transformer in the lazarette, he found a slow leak under the starboard davit. A freshwater leak that goes on for a long time in a wood boat is never a good thing, so we asked Daniel to take a break in his stainless fabricating to investigate the leak. As we suspected, the whole structure under the davit was gone, and it had to be replaced. Thank goodness Daniel was always up to the task of taking on any challenging and nasty job in a confined space. As was his trademark, he had the job completed in record time and without one complaint.
Despite every crewmember’s enthusiasm for continuing to tackle the impossible day after day, I found these inevitable set-backs to be very frustrating; it often felt like we were moving two steps forward and one back. But persevere we did…
