Back down to earth with a bump...

I had planned to write a grumbling post about how hard and horrible some of the jobs we've been doing have been in the last week.  That together with a couple of days of bad weather seemed to mean that we'd have a bit of down to earth reality to talk about after the unabated joy of the first few days in the water.

For the life of me I can't seem to do it.  Now the nasty jobs are beaten into some kind of submission and the weather has turned glorious I really can't summon the energy to gripe nor really remember what seemed so bad... 
 

So here it is; life is great here.  We love living on Impetuous every bit as much as we thought we would and almost everyone who passes; even those on the stupidly huge engined powerboats; manage to find a second to holler over the noise of their engines what a beautiful boat we have and what a great job we're doing.  They don't know the half of it but it's lovely to hear.

Several people have even called out

 'oh boy, is that an Alajuela? Jeez she sure is pretty'

We glow in pride.

So what've we been up to?  Well the first few days post splash were spent trying to organise our stuff; mostly our wood piles and getting the bowsprit etc over here.  We were borrowing Rogers truck which made this much easier.  We got our last coat of varnish on the mast; number 14 and called round on some friends and the resale shops.  By Monday we were delighted to give it back and to return by bicycle to settle properly into life on Impetuous with nowhere else to go.   

First jobs then were to put on the bowsprit and Aries.  Nice fun jobs that Duncan will write about.  Then we should have been working on the toerails and hatch but other tasks took over.  

Lets just say that after three whole days we now have a working freshwater tap and no urine in the bilge! (Thankfully unrelated) 
 
Our beautiful fresh water handpump is for now being ignored in favour of a rebuilt foot pump, the water tanks are scrubbed out and treated, the holding tank now has a seal(!), the pump out pump now has bolts holding it together and a seal(!), all the valves that were installed by the previous owner are now round the right way and tightened up and the bilges have all been bleached.

What our forward water tank used to look like...

Pump has been taken off but can't be removed through the gap in the cupboard without some more radical destruction... best leave it there.

One Y valve taken apart; this doesn't seem to be the problem anymore...

Trying to isolate the problem; wire up pump, try to pump from one bucket to another; the pump is no longer the problem...

All those awkward and revolting jobs now seem so far in the past that we can bearly remember them.  Perhaps it's our inability to focus on the negative side that makes us willing and able to persevere with this seemingly endless task we've set ourselves. 
 
Now the sun is shining, Impetuous is bobbing about gently and I'm looking forward to cutting up and sanding teak all day.

 
So the plan at the moment is to hold fire with the mast until we've sorted our visas out.  We're toying with the idea of driving to Mexico next weekend.  So long as the hire company will allow us to, and we don't hear from anyone that we'd be likely refused re-entry this seems like the quickest, easiest and cheapest plan that will not risk us getting caught or in trouble. 

 

This is fine as there are still so many things to do; I have to try to be more focused and just get the toerails and hatch done; these jobs rely on each other as the pieces need to be jigsawed from the same boards of teak with as little waste as possible.  What we'd really like to do is run a few more wires around the boat; we'd really like to have our guages up and running so we know what we're using and getting in via our solar panel, but this will have to wait as keeping the rain out and having a shut boat while we're away is the priority.  At the moment we're checking regularly with the volt meter and our nice new batteries appear to be super happy with us.  We've never read them at less than 12.5v yet.

Last night plugging up toerails done so far...

I'm going to get on now but we will be posting some more pictures of progress very soon and we're working on our 'beginners guide to scarfing' for our restoration pages so check back or press one of the subscribe buttons to get emailed when we update.