Still plugging away.

Ann spent the entire day slaving away at stainless steel polishing (why do they call it stainless when it takes her at least a week of hard labor to polish it?). For my part, I’m down to miscellaneous projects. I’m on the eighth and last coat of paint on the hydro-generator. Four coats of aluminum primer and four coats of epoxy. Tomorrow I get to try and put it back together. I also added a new steering line to “Wilson” the wind vane. Sounds ridiculously simple, but you have to stich it together and all told it takes a couple hours. Also, a troublesome fiddle on the main cabin table has been vexing us for a year now. It has two post-holes that have gotten too big and it falls off all the time at a mere touch. Sooo…I mixed up some epoxy and filled the holes expecting to then drill them out tomorrow. But…the epoxy was too old and didn’t “kick off”. Another wasted couple hours as I had to buy new epoxy, clean the goop out of the holes and reapply a new batch. Boatwork is like that. One step forward, two back.

Our sails are supposed to arrive tomorrow. We’re looking forward to seeing what they look like. Doyle is making an entirely new jib and recutting the stays’l? Cross fingers, but they are good people.

So, you’re wondering about the Mexican train? It’s a game with dominoes that is popular with cruisers. We started a game with Rita and Uli from the German boat “Anni Nad” up in Fiji about six months ago. We were anchored inside the reef and it got windy and we needed to get back to our boat, so we postponed the game. Fast forward to today: Ann still had the scorecard showing Uli with a commanding lead. As we resumed the game tonight it was looking like Bob would take it after “running the board” with one of his hands, but Uli came back for a come from behind win. Unfortunately, Ann came in dead last. Very unusual as she is a fierce competitor!

So there you are. About a week from heading out on a shakedown cruise along the NZ coast and then on to Fiji!