Hanging in Buffalo

We are so close to leaving! After months of planning, we're in our final stages of preparation. And by final stages, I mean we still have roughly 87 gazillion more things to do. But we'll get underway before the Erie Canal closes or die trying!

We'll definitely have to clean the boat up before we go. With all of the projects Justin and I have been working on, it's a bit of a mess.

Right now, our seaworthy vessel is taking a short vacation as a landlubber. We had Mischief Managed pulled out of the water a few weeks ago to repaint the bottom with special saltwater paint. Lucky Justin got to spend a week literally bending over backwards sanding the old paint off, and then I got to come in and put the new coat of paint on. In case you also plan on painting the bottom of your boat, I have one recommendation for you: wear a hat. There is nothing more miserable than trying to pull disgusting, sticky boat paint out of your hair. Unlike normal paint that goes on walls, boat paint is designed to resist water. (In my experience, there aren't too many rooms that are regularly submerged in liquid.) But after many hours of hard work, and many more hours standing in my shower pulling out sticky clumps of hair, we finally finished painting the boat.

Except for the parts we couldn't paint. While our boat is on land, it rests on its keel (the bottom fin of the boat.) The boat weighs around 20,000 lbs, so we couldn't just tilt it over to paint the bottom. Instead, we had to lift the boat up, which was both terrifying and super cool.

When a boat comes out of the water, it's carried by a giant machine called a travel lift. This thing is so weird. It looks like a giant cube on wheels. It lives at it's own special boat slip, and boats can drive right into it from the water. Then some very tired-looking underpaid yard workers pull cloth straps under the boat and hook it to either side of the lift. The straps hoist the boat out of the water, and your boat hangs there like a baby in a bouncer walker while the travel lift drives it wherever you want it to go.

When you're a travel lift, it's hip to be square.

Painting the keel is one of the last things we need to do before the boat can go back in the water. So the nice guys at the boatyard agreed to lift Mischief Managed in the travel lift and leave it hanging for the weekend while we finish up, then drive the lift and the boat back to the water on Monday. This gives us just enough time to paint the last little bit of the keel that the boat had been sitting on.

Unfortunately, that means while I was painting the very bottom keel of the boat (you'll notice it's still white with primer in these pictures) I got to rest easy knowing there was nothing between me and 20,000 lbs of enormous crushing death except two measly little cloth straps.

This strap was the only thing keeping me from becoming a lump of squished goo on the ground. 

Casey inches away from death.

In the end, we got it done, and the boat is going to be as waterproof as possible!

Meanwhile, Justin has been toiling at his own projects. A few weeks ago, we took the boat out to anchor for the weekend back when we had the luxury of time to just sit and not do things. (Okay, I sat and did nothing. Justin installed solar panels.) Anyway, at the end of the weekend, I hopped into the shower because I'm a normal person and enjoy being clean and not offending people with my personal stench. About half-way through my shower, the water ran out. After some quick math while I toweled the shampoo from my hair, Justin and I figured out that our water tank held about three showers worth of water. Now, there are a lot of things that I like about Justin, but his smell in the mornings is not one of them. The idea of magnifying that smell in a small space for an extended period of time was not appealing. So we decided to take the plunge and get a water-maker. This is a fabulous device that turns any surrounding water, salt-water included, into fresh drinking water. Justin has just finished installing our brand new water-maker in the boat. Unfortunately, it's not going to do us much good while the boat's still on land. 

If this turned saltwater into Coke, Justin would never leave the boat. 

Justin also had to repair the wood on our starboard rub rail that had started to rot away. Now, you've heard of the story If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, right? Well, in our situation, it's If You Let Justin Varnish. First, he'll want to varnish the bit of rail that came off. Then he'll want to sand down the rest of the rail on that side of the boat. And before long, Justin has spent a week sanding and re-varnishing almost all of the teak on our boat. It does look nice and shiny now, though. 

That's a week of Justin's life. Gone. But shiny. 

And finally, Justin has realized that while he can pull the anchor up by hand, he doesn't really want to all of the time. So he bought a windlass. (An electric winch that allows us to push a button and the anchor will go up and down.) Now, all of these gadgets and gizmos Justin bought for the boat have been pretty expensive, but Justin figured out pretty quickly that he can get me to agree to any expense if he says the magic word: safety. In the case of the windlass, it was a little bit of a stretch, but he got there. He said he would be more inclined to be picky about anchoring spots and pull the anchor back up if it hadn't set perfectly if he didn't have to haul the anchor back up every time. Being picky about anchoring spots is important for safety.

So many tools. Such a mess. 

I know our departure date seems far away, but we really are on track to leave in about a week or so. Our next steps are installing our AIS (Automatic Identification System) and radar, waxing the boat, and soon, getting the boat back in the water! Oh, and bringing aboard our furrier crew members. Stay tuned!

tl;dr: We're still in Buffalo working on the boat, but we're leaving soon.