Weather Helmed

A few weeks ago, we had a friend in town who was anxious to experience the boat.  Not only were we having dinner in the cabin and eating on the recently reconstructed fold-down table, but our friend G would be sleeping on the settee that night, too(!!!)  (He was adorably giddy at the thought of sleeping on a sailboat.)  I made a pizza and beer run, returning to hand three steaming boxes down into the cabin, followed by some cheap Trader Joe’s hefeweizen.  Hands empty, I dropped down into the companionway myself.  Six of us standing and lounging in our tiny cabin was about four people too many.  We laughed and joked as we sucked our guts in and slid by each other, stumbling over feet, flailing for something to grab onto, finding our faces suddenly confronted with someone’s armpit…  Finally seated, I glanced around at the smiles, feeling the warmth radiating within the narrow confines, the happiness bubbling over and rising up out through the hatches.  As I scooted ever closer to my companions to allow room for more hips and elbows, my mind flitted back and forth between, “Man this boat is sooo small” and “No, it’s just big enough…”

….  And that’s pretty much the regular internal conversation I have every time I step foot in the cabin.  If your shower had counter tops in a U-shape around the tub, you would essentially be standing in our galley; If you stand immediately in front of your toilet and turn around, that’s about the size of our head (boat bathroom); If you take about 10 normal steps, you’ve walked the entire length of our cabin.  (I studied the layout yesterday and determined that, if the boat were not heeling, and I knelt at an angle,  slightly to the left of the mast, I could just barely do forward lunges between the settees.)  Down in the belly of the boat, I feel ENORMOUS – like Gulliver must have felt when he arrived in Lilliput.  I am not a big person to begin with, but the ceilings seem so low, the length so short, the kitchen so narrow and tiny, the cabinets so shallow and insufficient for all the stuff we’ll need.

Today, though, I was up on the foredeck, preparing the deck area from the bow back to the cabin-top for painting.  We are going to put “non-skid” on all those places where we’ll need more traction, and then the rest gets nice, fancy, smooth, shiny paint.  So far this foredeck area alone has taken me, oh, about 16hours and I haven’t even begun painting for real yet.  I finished the second coat of primer tonight and stood back to admire my work.  Even with the uneven, swirly brush and roller strokes, that white triangle looked SO MUCH BETTER than the rest of the deck.  Looked so much better until I turned around and considered the remaining daunting task before us – sanding, acetone-ing, quick-faring, sanding again, acid-washing, priming, sanding a third time, acid-washing again, priming again, and finally painting the rest of this 40 foot Mo-Fo.

And, welcome to Brobdingnag.

*** I found the photos via google images and didn’t see any info about copyrights…?? If you find that they are protected, please let me know! 🙂