Dry-sanding the hull.
Finally! One week after our original date, Cambria came out of the water. And, for the first time, I missed the whole thing!
We were scheduled for 11 am, so we upped anchor and came into the marina around 9 or 9:30 to tie up and wait. When I took Sally for a walk, Doug, the yard manager, came down to look at the boat. A few minutes later, he said he was ready, and up she went. For once, without all the drama usually associated with it.
Forty-five minutes later, Sally and I were walking back to the boat only to find it wasn't there. I looked around for our mast (generally the tallest one around) and finally found it in the boatyard where I also found David power washing the hull – this truly is a do-it- yourself yard! But what we hadn't expected is that it's also a bring-it-yourself yard...including ladders to climb on and off the boat. Had our friends, Chris and David Dewees who live in the marina, not offered to lend us theirs, we'd still be standing there looking up at Cambria wondering what's next.
But I digress...it's been close to three years and 5000 miles since our last haul-out; and we were a little concerned about what we would find attached to Cambria's bottom, but she looked good. As a matter of fact, with the exception of a small muscle farm dangling from the keel and one trying to squeeze its way in between the rudder and stalk, she looked GREAT. So, with all of the slime washed off her bottom, she was brought over to her spot in the yard where she was propped up and the Travelift dropped its slings leaving us to work.
The first day of a haul-out can be easily wasted organizing jobs, but we managed to get a lot accomplished. I dry-sanded the hull – a first, and hopefully last, for me. Normally we wet-sand but Washington requires using a shop-vac attached to an electric sander in hopes that it's better for the environment. It was AWFUL!!! And made more of a mess than wet-sanding does...not to mention me! It also took a lot longer –four hours versus one or two. Meanwhile, David attacked the barnacles that had attached themselves to the prop while the angle grinder attacked him...twice. Fortunately, no hospital visits or stitches were required, but there's always tomorrow.
Before we knew it, it was 7 o'clock. It had been a very long, but productive first day so we put the tools away, drug ourselves to the shower, scrubbed ourselves clean and went straight to bed – tired, sore, and clearly out of shape.
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