Nooks and Crannies AKA A good spring-cleaning below the
floorboards.
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| I stop to admire my work after cleaning out the space below floorboard #29, a nice small one with only three sections. |
We are cleaning out the spaces beneath the floorboards.
This is a job that will take three of us a week to do.
A boat designed for long-distance cruising must be a very self-contained
unit and if you are a good captain you are not only sailor but also electrician,
plumber, carpenter, etc.. You need to
know how to trouble shoot and fix ALL the systems on your boat; the engine, the
computer and GPS and AIS and radar, the toilet and sink, the diesel generator,
the dingy and outboard motor, to say nothing of the sails, and ropes and
pulleys and winches… because when you’re at sea and something breaks down you
have to be able to fix it, it might be a life and death situation, and you
can’t just call a professional in.
And, to fix or replace anything, you need the parts and tools. You can’t
drop into Canadian Tire. (And, even if you are in the calm of a marina when
things go wrong - very unlikely of course as parts tend to come apart when in a
storm and the boat is rising and crashing with each wave - the small town in the
odd country that you are in may well not have a store that stocks the specific
and esoteric bits you need.) So, below the floorboards, in a huge selection of
oddly shaped and sometimes wet compartments, you keep your own Canadian Tire
with spare oil filters, and toilet hoses, and battery wires, and computer
connectors, and starter motors and on and on and on. (Also, of course, you also
have mixed in a whole grocery store of rice and beans and canned goods, sugar
and flour and extra spices…)
This week we have been cleaning out the spaces below the floor boards.
(There are 38 of them on Dana, some
with as many as 8 compartments each.) It goes like this: Sven lifts the floor
off the specific sections we are working on any given day, Lisa and I take
everything out and put it in the cockpit, then one of us cleans all the stuff,
wipes the dirt and rust and mold off, repackages it all in new plastic bags,
and the other lies on the floor reaching uncomfortably down into the space below
and cleans (easier said than done, way easier!). Often, usually in fact, the
space is not rectangular, its floor is not flat but curved to the bottom of the
boat, and there may be parts of it taken up by water tanks or fuel tanks, and electrical
wires or water hoses might run through it. And, for sure, whatever dirt is
present is firmly encrusted and requires much elbow grease to remove.
Eventually Sven comes to check on our work, shines a flashlight into the space
to see if it meets inspection, pokes at the multitude of oddities we have
brought out, sighs at how out of place things are, (rum, for example, is
supposed to be stored in compartment 5 but we found various bottles, dozens of
bottles in fact, in a miscellany of different locations - mixed in with the
generator oil and down below the freeze dried food and behind the fiberglass
repair kit…) updates his inventory, notes which of the bits we have found still
need to be fixed, and takes some of the broken or badly rusted pieces off to
his workshop to fix or clean. Nothing gets thrown out, if a salt-water-pump
breaks, for example, and you replace it with the new one you have on board, you
then keep the old one, because, if at a later date the new one breaks, the old
one might be ‘less broken’ and easier to fix. Sven finally puts everything
away, puts the floorboards back on, looks at the clock, sees that it is 6 pm,
and declares it cocktail hour (he makes great cocktails) and we sit out in the
cockpit in the still warm evening sun and I, at least, marvel at how much work
we did and how little there is to show for it.
But I like it. My arms are scratched and bruised from waving wet cloths
down around in dark dusty holes with sharp pieces of metal sticking out in
unexpected locations, my ribs hurt from being forced over the edge of the floor
so that I can reach the furthest deepest corners, my mind reels from the
thought of how much you need to know to successfully sail a boat of this size… but I really do like it. I like working. I
like being part of a team. I like being here. This job doesn’t pay,
unfortunately, but it comes with huge tides, and that wonderful tang of
seawater, and large birds hanging out on the end of the dock, and, oh yes, a
volcano visible in the distance. It’s also on a boat. And in Chile (which is
just cool all by itself). And, although we are still at dock and will be for a
while hence, it comes with the allure of future adventures in far off places.
But first we have to finish under the floorboards.
