I wake up in the morning, having slept very well, and turn
over. I ache everywhere. My right arm is particularly sore. And my left knee
seems seriously bruised. I am not used to waking up in this condition. What was
I doing yesterday? I roll back over. Bad decision. More aches surface. As my
consciousness slowly returns I remember. I was scrubbing the boat yesterday.
Getting the rust off.
HS has a list of chores that need doing before we leave. It
is a long list and it is ordered with the most difficult and/or critical chores
first and the easiest or least important chores at the end. This is very
logical. For a few days, however, it left me with little to do because I
couldn’t help with the chores at the top of the list. One day, however, because
I was bored (and also because they were very dirty) I took an hour or two and
scrubbed off the cushions in the cockpit, our sundeck equivalent, where we sit
out each evening to have a beer and gather with neighbours. ‘I know, I know,’ I
said to HS as he watched me critically, ‘on your list of chores this is at the
very bottom and isn’t scheduled to be done for days…’ but I guess that got him
thinking because ever since I have been busy.
It is as if he has folded the
list in half, and we are both working away at it from opposite ends, he still
continues to work on the important tricky chores, by which I really mean the
technological and or mechanical ones, but he given me the easiest, and most
labour intensive ones, to do alongside him. I like it. It has been an interesting week in a very ‘chop
wood, carry water’ kind of way.
I spent a day, a
whole day, sewing on a new leather wheel cover. Each hole, of which there were
literally hundreds, had to be punctured, and then a needle had to be pushed
through the leather with a palm, a sort of thimble attached to a leather strap
which you wear on your hand, a tool which I’m sure Captain Cook’s sailors all
owned, and then the thread had to be both pulled through and pulled tight. (See photo. HS meanwhile was working on the touch screen again. See other photo.) I
think I put more holes in the leather than in my thumbs, but I didn’t actually
count.
Yesterday HS was installing a new very expensive membrane in
the water maker, and, as I said, I was scrubbing rust of the boat. ‘Laundry
detergent sort of helps,’ HS said, ‘or maybe Vim.’ Laundry detergent didn’t do
much to help and we had no Vim. I took a break in the middle of the afternoon
and walked to the grocery store to get some Vim but I knew I was only postponing
the job. Elbow grease gets rust off. Lots of it. I know. From experience now. And
it makes your muscles sore the next day. Especially those in your right arm.
(My knee, now that was my own fault, boats are, very roughly, raindrop shaped,
they come to a point at the bow, or front, so the bow is further away from the
dock. I was reaching out, way out, and scrubbing the bow when a gust pushed the
boat a few inches even further out. For a while I hung there, hands on the lip
of the deck and feet on the dock, but I knew I couldn’t hang forever, and so,
eventually, I made a leap for the boat, bashed my knee against it, and fell in
the water. I changed and went back to scrubbing. The other side of the bow is,
if you look very closely, not quite as clean.)
Today I spent the day cleaning the inside of the boat;
sweeping and vacuuming and mopping the floors, washing down walls, etc.. The
boat is not very big but it needed a LOT of cleaning. Some bits seemed not to have
been cleaned for years. As I was attacking the back of one door, covered in
years of dust and grime, I glanced up and saw HS. I could hear his silent
comment, ‘I don’t usually clean there’, and he could hear my silent response,
‘I see that’, and he managed not to say anything. Now the boat is sparkling
inside and out. Both my husband and youngest son would be amazed. I don’t think
I ever cleaned my house as well as I have cleaned the boat. Somehow, because I
don’t have to, it is far more enjoyable. After cleaning I helped HS put up the
bimini, install a new furling line, splice some new docking lines… Each day is
different. Each job is new. Some, perhaps, take longer than I would like, and
many would not be fun if I were doing them for days on end, but so far I have
no complaints.
Floors on a boat, by the way, are odd, compared to say, in a
house. If there is even two inches of space under the floor boards then there
is a cupboard there, and hence some sort of locker opening, and, also, cracks
around the edges where dust can collect. Cleaning floors on a boat is also odd,
compared to say, in a house. ‘Use lots of water,’ HS told me, ‘the extra just
drips down into the bilge.’
I also get to do the odd jobs, biking for example, across
the border into Gibraltar, flashing my passport at the guard without stopping,
but then waiting a couple minutes for a plane to land before crossing the
airstrip, just to get another rope. It is amazing how much rope, which is
always called line, is needed on a boat.
We usually work till about six, then sit in the cockpit and
have a beer, then cook and eat, then chill, then fall into our bunks around 10. I know that
tomorrow HS will be installing a newly arrived circuit board for the nav
computer (one of five that we have on board) but I’m not sure what my assigned
chore will be. I like it that way. I feel sort of like I am living in a
commune. We are communal. We are a (very small) community. Tonight, again, I
will sleep well.
