Johanna
N 28° 7.643', W 15° 25.510'
Four weeks ago we moved temporarily out of our home. We didn't move far, just to the opposite side of the marina to an other Finnish boat. Our good friends Auli and Hannu from s/y Manta flew back to Finland for a couple of months and they were glad that someone is looking after their boat when they are gone.
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| Moving was done by dinghy. It was very easy. We loaded as much as we could in it. I drove the dinghy and Timo came to the other side by bike. It's incredible how much stuff you can carry on a little dinghy. We still had to make quite many trips, so I guess the cycling was a good exercise for Timo. |
Manta is just a little bit bigger than Iiris and now it's quite full of stuff. First their own and now ours as well. But it's more than enough for us that we have a nice and clean bunk to sleep in. And we haven't filled all of the boat, we still have couches (well, maybe half of them) around the table so we can have breakfast there. Usually we are too tired to cook dinner and we just go to a nearby Sailor's Bar. We have also watched some movies from DVDs. We don't have a tv on board, so this has been quite a change for us. Last time we watched tv or DVDs was back in Finland more than a year ago. We don't count the occasional football we see in a bar.
Now we can really work on the boat when we don't have our things filling every place and we also don't have to worry about inhaling the dust at night. Now we can do the whole bottom at one time. But what a long time it takes. It's not an easy job. Under the bunks there was first glass fiber, then urethane foam and then well... there should be just the paint and the steel, but in some places there is also some rust. We have now maybe revealed half of the bottom. We sure hope there is not going to be any big surprises.
Our biggest problem is that we have to disassemble quite much and we are running out of space on the deck. Lucky for us, an other Finnish couple just flew home for the summer so now we are moving things there. They are also glad that someone is looking after their boat.
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| Doors and floorboards on their way to s/y Stormy. |
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| We have everything that we believe that can handle the outside weather (some covered, some not) stored on the deck. That includes batteries. |
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| First there is the GRP to remove. Timo first cuts it to pieces and then forces it out, pretty physical job. No need for any other exercise. And if you have any idea of the positions you have to work on the boat... |
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| The urethane foam is quite easy to remove with a wire brush attached to a grinder. |
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| But this is how my husband looks like after 5 minutes. |
I bet all this sounds like really hard and ugly work to you. I can assure you that it is. But everything has it's good sides, I hope. We are going to make some pretty big changes when we put everything back together. One of the biggest changes will be that our batteries go to a new location. When the boat was built it was a normal maintenance routine to check the acid levels of the batteries. So they were in a very easy place to get to. Now that's ancient history and all the batteries need no service. So we put the batteries where they are out of reach and we get a very good and large storage place with a very easy access.
In the end we believe that we'll have things a bit better than we used to have. That is of course that we don't find any big surprised in the hull. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.
