Though this occupational disease is highly contagious, not every person becomes affected and some do more than others. I suppose it also has to do with that particular person’s personality and his or her current state of mind. I myself am rather a perfectionist and don’t mind fiddling with details. No wonder then, that after three weeks of painting, I have been exhibiting some symptoms of “painting disease”.

Another spot to practice my painting skills…

Not that I am walking around the marina and checking other boats’ paint jobs or evaluating the quality of the painting on the ceiling in the marina showers – after all something like this would be too presumptuous given that I’m only a greenhorn when it comes to painting. On the other hand, I must admit that I notice these details more now than I’ve done before. You see, my symptoms manifest themselves chiefly during the night.

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. You dream the whole night about working hard and when you finally wake up in the morning, you feel utterly exhausted. As though you have just spent the whole night shoveling heaps of coal or piling pieces of firewood (anyway these are the phrases we use in the Czech language). Myself, I have been painting a lot in my dreams these days.

Usually after couple of hours sleep I wake up sweating and thirsty – man, it’s hard work this painting! I get up from the bunk and after two cups of water I lay down again. Usually I manage to fall asleep again and before morning comes I often do some more of that painting-dreaming.

Yet yesterday I just couldn’t fall back to sleep. I rolled onto one side and thought about tomorrow’s painting job. Do I have everything I need – rollers, measuring cups, tin to transfer the paint…? Then I speculated about how much paint to mix in order to have just enough (this time I’m using two part epoxy paint) and thought about the other spots that I could prep just in case I end up with some leftover paint after all. Of course I can’t fall asleep and so I roll onto my other side. Suddenly it seems that the circulation of air inside the boat is quite good and that I could probably turn off that noisy fan. So I get up again and do that. But the moment I lay down, I realize that it’s quite hot without the fan, so I get up once more and turn it back on. Maybe I will manage to doze off now…

Usually I do, but not yesterday. After some two hours of tossing and turning during which I went through all the possible variants of tomorrow’s painting and also thought about the sequence of jobs for the following week, I suddenly realized that I forget to fill a few spots under the bunk I was just lying on, the same place I wanted to paint today. If I left it till morning, I would have to wait till lunch before I could send the filler and start painting.

Boat mess – the inevitable consequence of small boat repairs

I pondered a while about the ridiculousness of the whole idea of mixing epoxy filler at 3 am and also considered the potential risk of being attacked by a fellow cruiser also suffering from insomnia who might mistake me for a thief after I start rummaging through our cockpit lockers in search of the filler. Will I suffer a blow with a spare tiller – since there’s usually a shortage of baseball clubs aboard cruising saiboats, he or she might as well use a spare tiller or a “weapon” of similar kind. In the end I decided that it’s worth the risk, got up, carefully put the mattress from my bunk on the stuff that has been slowly pilling up on the opposite settee now that I’ve been dismantling more and more of the boat’s furniture. Then I took off the boards on which the mattress lies and using my headlamp I filled the few spots I forgot to fill during the day. In the end I finally fell back to sleep sometime around 4 am. The alarm clock rang at 0600. Time to get back to work!

PS: Will write more about the painting itself soon. And will post some more pics!

After the successful painting project in the V-berth area, we decided to continue with the “closet”. First of all we moved all our cloths and other stuff stored in the previous head area on the V-berth, disassembled the closet shelves and unscrewed all the other components like handrails, fire extinguisher etc. Sounds easy enough, but only this part took me the whole afternoon.

It’s been some time since we noticed that one of the tabbings (fiberglass joints) that bond the fiberglass hull with the wooden bulkheads came unstuck. Since we were about to paint the whole area, we decided now was the right time to repair it. Of course, once we removed all the stuff from the closet, we found out that out of the four tabbings in the closet, we had to replace not one but three of them! So once again out went the chisel and hammer, the old tabbings were removed, everything sanded and just before glassing in the new tabbings, we smoothed the sharp edges by making a fillet with epoxy filler.

A proper decorating job couldn’t be done without ripping off the rest of the old shabby vinyl wallpaper. As long as it was hidden deep inside the closet and behind the piles of our cloths, we could happily ignore its existence. Yet once we uncovered the filthy stuff, we couldn’t but wonder how on earth did we manage to live with something like this inside our boat for such a long time…

Once the retabbing was done – we used six layers of fiberglass cloth for each tabbing and ended up using almost one liter of epoxy glue – I glued back the wallpaper on the bulkheads that came unstuck or was removed because of the repairs and then I covered the rest of the furniture and wooden bits, wires, portlights etc. with masking tape. After five days of work we were finally ready for painting. Now we must wait till the paint is hard enough so that we can put everything back together.

Last but not least, a quick update regarding our engine mounts. Though it’s been at least three days since they arrived back in Malaysia, they’re still stuck on the peninsula somewhere near Kuala Lumpur. The latest update on the UPS website says: The address is in a remote area and deliveries are not made daily / Delivery rescheduled. We can only guess when exactly will the mounts arrive here…

What a contrast! The above photo is actually a tiny part of the already painted ceiling in the closet and still unpainted one in the main saloon. Can’t wait to paint the rest of the boat!

Meanwhile we chiseled off some old paint from the current engine bed and filled most of the holes for the original screws that held the old engine mounts. Then Petr took our grinder and grinded the top surfaces before we fill the rest of the holes with epoxy filler. Originally we wanted to paint the whole engine room as well – now that the engine is out of the boat, it’s a good opportunity to do it. Luckily we soon realized that it is possible that we will have to modify the current fiberglass bed after the mounts arrive and we try to assemble the whole thing inside the boat. If it really comes to this, all our efforts would be wasted.

But the idea of painting was already firmly planted in my head. Plus we already bought the paint and brushes. All I had to do was to find an object that would benefit from some painting. That part was easy! In fact, after going through our floating home from bow to stern, it soon became obvious that I would have to start making a list and decide where exactly to begin. After all Janna is almost 40 years old now and all the repairs and upgrades we have done so far were more of a structural and functional kind, e.g. new rigging (both standing and running), new sails, proper seacocks etc. With the exception of the reconstruction of our teak cockpit, there just never was any time for “cosmetics”.

Until now that is! And so to kill time while waiting for the new engine mounts and with Petr fully occupied by programming a simple home inventory app astorage, I jumped onto my bike and went for yet another trip to the local hardware shop to buy a new orbital sender (we burnt the last one during our first major refit in Singapore) and began the redecorating of our V-berth.

The walls inside of the boat (apart from most of the bulkheads of course) are covered with some kind of vinyl wallpaper. After 40 years, it’s quite shabby and yellow in color though, not to mention that it peels off at various places. One of the previous owners clearly ripped off the one above the V-berth and simply painted the fiberglass underneath with white paint. Yet after couple of years, the concave spaces between the fibers filled with dirt that just couldn’t be cleaned no matter how hard I’ve tried. It had to be sanded off. So first I covered the whole V-berth with big garbage bags that I cut into large rectangular sheets and then lowered myself into this plastic hole through the hatch with my new orbital sender.

After two hours of sending I reemerged through the same hatch all covered with white fiberglass dust and went straight to the shower rooms. The next day I sanded few hardly accessible places by hand and all was ready for painting.

The first coat took me more than one hour during which I cursed and swore like a trooper – the damn brush just kept on shedding hair and I had to pick these from the quickly hardening paint. After 30 minutes or so I was fed up with painting and wanted to throw everything into the dust bin and just walk away. Who on Earth gave me the idea of painting!?

The second day I was cleverer. Instead of the bloody paintbrush I used a roller and a tray and what a difference that made! Suddenly I enjoyed painting again. In no more than five minutes I had the ceiling painted and after another 15 minutes the whole V-berth was done.

In the afternoon I put on the third coat and in the evening we reassembled everything back to its original state. Now that our V-berth is nice and shiny, it’s time for our closet, i.e. the previous head area. But that will be covered in another post. Right now the chisel and hammer already beckon and it’s time to start with the preparatory demolition…