Adventures of Luck of a Fool: June 21, 22, 23, 2016 St Mary's Boat Serives

There is a building in the boatyard with the shower and laundry. This isn’t a marina, only a boat yard. So they don’t have much for amenities. The building has one unisex bathroom with a shower. There is a laundry/kitchen/library room. They have one washer and one dryer that are $1 each. Another lady told me it didn’t look like much, but they work great. The front loading washing machine has a sliding lock to keep it closed. But it looked great to me after hand washing my clothes for the past 5 months.

The kitchen area had a microwave, toaster oven, hot plate and dishes. Someone makes coffee every morning. We are free to use whatever we would like. Above the washer and dryer are some book shelves with about 50 books. I brought in about 10 books and only picked up 2.

I did about 6 loads of laundry on Tuesday and Wednesday. They have a covered porch with chairs outside the building. I sat there and read or used the internet. But I also was able to visit with other boaters. Some people bring their boats here to work on. Others just store their boat here for the hurricane season. But we met a few people that have been here for 3 years. We hope that isn’t a trend once you start working on your boat.

the laundry room from the side. shower is on the right end

our shower

laundry and library on the left

kitchen on the right

We picked up rib eye steaks on Monday and Dave grilled them on Tuesday. That is one thing we haven’t had in a long time. And we prefer to cook it ourselves (or have my brother-in-law, Jim, grill them in Aberdeen, SD). I made a tabouli salad with the fresh vegetables I picked up. We had enough for dinner on Wednesday night, also.

Dave is starting to cross off some things on the list. But there is still some prep work being done for bigger projects.

On Thursday, I got into the action. There were snaps in our cockpit to attach covers for the teak wood. Since we have cushions, we don’t use the covers. So awhile back, Dave removed the snaps and covered them with blue painter’s tape. Today, I scraped off the old tape, drilled out the holes to be able to add gelcoat using a dry vac to pick up the fiberglass, and re-taped them. There were about 50 in the cockpit. We still need to remove the about 10 snaps off the stern swim platform. But the sun was too intense by the time I got to that part. My weather app said it was 90 but felt like 98.

and I helped!

Dave is working on removing our “boot stripe” with a sander. The hull has bottom paint. Then there is a white space of a couple inches, then the boot stripe. When we clean the bottom of the boat, the white strip is always dirty. That is because our boat sits a little deeper in the water with it loaded for living aboard. So when we paint the bottom this time, we are going to “raise the water line”. We will paint the bottom paint higher, leave a space and then add the boot stripe. Or forget the boot stripe, we’ll see how the painting goes.