Memorial Day Weekend

We had heard that Kim was coming up from Hialeah to the Tampa Bay area to visit and Frank William was coming down from Alabama too. Unfortunately schedules being what they are, things didn't work out so that we could get together. We will have to make a STRONG concerted effort to meet up for the 4th of July...

As for ourselves, we spent Saturday night taking Katrina out to Arigato's Japanese restaurant as a personal happy birthday event, and to introduce her to a different style of Japanese foods. Dean and Brenda (thanks again for the sailboat, guys!) joined us after a day of kayaking, and we had a pretty nice time. The only surprise came from Katrina having some difficulty with breathing after we were about halfway through the meal. At first it was kind of hard to say what could haver triggered it, because she has had shrimp before with no ill effects, but then we realized that there was a lobster that was on the grill and the extra iodine from the shell may have kicked things up a bit. It was no big deal, just a quick 'breather' on the nebulizer and off she went, good as new.

The rest of the long weekend was dedicated to working on the sailboat.

Katrina began by scraping off all of the stickers, numbers and vinyl stripes from the hull.

I began by filling, scraping and sanding down a bunch of score marks caused by being moored up against some pilings.

As we worked we realized we needed some cover over our heads, so we took the tarp we were covering the boat with and suspended it from the trees. This worked out well.

This is a shot after the bottom paint has been applied and the upper hull prep work was done and ready for a coat of primer.

This is a view of Before and After, to show the old bottom paint vs. the new bottom paint. I like the blue bottom paint better. The winch is out-of-kilter because we had to loosen it to remove the crutch that was pressing against the bow. I just threw the bolts and nuts on without aligning the winch and tightening them down.

This view shows the hull with the first coat of oyster white paint on it. Oyster white is a light, tannish-yellow which is nearly an identical match of the original factory hull color. If you look closely, you can see our black cat Smokey, perched on the deck in the upper-right of the picture.

A rear view of our handywork and a closer look at Smokey.

At the moment Blogger.com is still having trouble with uploading pictures and such, so I had to write the HTML code and load pictures from a separate storage site to get things to work for now. Talk about dedication to the cause...