August 10, 2008.

Wow, it’s already the tenth of the month. Since the last time I’ve written we’ve been plenty busy.

Once the boat was on the hard, we set about knocking off as many of the chores on our “to do” list as we could. I compounded and waxed the hull and brought Veranda back to her gleaming self.

Christy took this opportunity to clean the bottom of the dinghy. It had been looking fairly scuzzy and with quite a bit of effort the bottom was scum free. It was a brutally hot day so she did her cleaning in her bathing suit and hosed herself off as she worked away at the dinghys bottom. Once the bottom was cleaned I repaired a couple of deep scratches in the dinks fiberglass. The constant beaching of the dink was beginning to take its toll and I remedied it by building up the worn away areas and then adding a layer of fiberglass cloth.

We had a couple of very clear, albeit very hot days. Since there was no chance of rain in the forecast I sanded the toe rail and rub rails and got 2 coats of Cetol on them. Two years ago we had completely stripped all the wood and used a good varnish on all the surfaces. It started to look like shit in only a few months so we decided to go back to the heartier Cetol. Last year we stripped everything and applied Cetol. We were rewarded with about a full year of good looking wood trim. Best of all is that the wood didn’t need to be completely stripped, just rough sanded before this years coats were applied. We’ll get 2 more coats on the wood when we get back from Jersey.


Christy also found time to re mark our anchor chain. We have it marked in 30 foot increments so we know how much chain we're paying out when we anchor.