Slow progress

Wasps, bees, water pumps, what else? Progress seems glacial at times and weird things keep interrupting us like a plague of wasps, then a broken water pump and this morning a swarm of bees tried to invade our boat. What's the deal?

We replaced the lifelines and have now started on the standing rigging piece by piece. We decided to get new chain plates fabricated to replace the 35 year old originals. While a few of them are getting fabricated we are working on refinishing the cap rail (clean, sand, seal, varnish) and then painting the whale stripe (the large brown stripe in the photo) and cap rail with paint. Turn the boat around and repeat.

After a week of chasing down machinists I finally got someone started on the parts. You can see two of the missing straps of metal on the side of our boat in the photo.

Why are there strips of blue tape on the hull? It was shockingly unnerving having light shining through the walls of our boat on the inside, so I put blue tape over them to give the illusion of normality.

Hopefully the locusts stay away long enough for us to finish.