We are getting there! Hopefully I make it to today (18th of May) with part 3…. No I didn’t! It is the 30th and the delay was caused by the website being updated and a boat sailing trip. So here we go.
It is only three months left to catch up. After this I am going to make the videos about the work we’ve done so far, but I’m not sure how I want to do that. I am practicing my editing skills with the short videos that go with the blogs. It’s fun to do and it doesn’t take that long, but obviously a video about the whole process of the boat is going to take way longer and I have to make a sort of a script for that, I think.
This video I made last week! It shows the dive (and snorkel) spot next to the boat yard, ‘The Orange Room’. Probably because there is something at 25 meters down the coral that looks orange, but I just snorkeled above the drop off and in shallow water. It is a fantastic way to end a day after working on the boat!
This blog is about the time between 21st of February and somewhere in the beginning of March. In this time we went from ‘we will get the boat in the water at the end of the month’ to ‘we need probably longer, maybe even a half year or more…’. The last mainly because we need to earn money and that takes time that we can’t spend on working on the boat. But we are figuring it out as we go.
Structure and stability
After the monohull we moved to the sleeping room of a good friend of Peter, who has a house on the island for over 20 years. It was really close to the boat yard and because our car didn’t wanted to start anymore, I could enjoy a very nice walk every day! Peter did eventually fix the car with a new starter :).
Living with Jörg was amazing! He is living in a very beautiful house with a big garden and we were so happy we could stay there. As guest we did as much as we could to not be a burden, help out where we could and adjust to his lifestyle, which was actually very good for us. Every morning breakfast at 8 made sure we had a rhythm again and started our day early. I could fit in my yoga practice again at 6 and the breakfast in the morning was really nice to catch up, talk about our plans and listen to the great stories of the adventures of the working life of Jörg. I still think he should write a book about his life.
He is very generous, very social and sympathetic and has many friends all over the world and what I find amazing, is that he is very good in keeping contact with them. His neighbor, Martha, is also a very good friend of him, and she always joined us for breakfast on Sundays, for diner during the week or for a drink in the evening. Also a truly lovely lady with a lot of life-experience, living in balance with nature and having such a beautiful view of the world and living on Bonaire. Every morning at 5 am she walks to Seru Largu and enjoys the early morning with the birds that are waking up chirping enthusiastically, bats flying around hunting in the clouds of mosquitos, and meeting the man who always does Tai Chi and walks backwards (I don’t know if that’s part of Tai Chi or just some other elusive exercise). She has her own cleaning company, and is still very fit and does voluntary work at the second hand shop of the Animal Shelter. She has lived in Argentina, France and has also many entertaining stories about that time. They both made it such a nice time while we were there to look back on. I am very grateful for everything they shared with us.
In the mean time I was also doing a web developer course online to know more about building a website and understanding how HTML, CSS and Java works. Very interesting, but this was way too detailed for the purpose Peter and I had. We decided to get this WordPress website, where everything is already arranged and I don’t really have to bother with the programming. The website and URL was made and it took some time to find the right lay-out or theme, thinking about how to write blogs, what to write, what pictures to use… All the experiences from the past months were chaotic in my brain and I realized it is a bit difficult to start something like this if you have a lot to share but not a strategy. With all the chaos I started to look at logo’s, color schemes, discovering how to make YouTube videos (I never used Clipchamp before), and sorting out all the material I had from the GoPro. This took some time and a lot of things I tried to figure out, seem now unnecessary, but probably that’s part of the learning progress.
Rust is sticky
On the boat we were making less progress than we wanted. My daily task was still getting the rust out and treat the steel surface with the anti-rust paint. I thought I could do the salon in a week, but since I am still busy with it now, I couldn’t really make a realistic planning.
I made numbers for the different compartments and thought I could just put them in the planning. This was before we moved to Jörg, but at the 9th of March this was my actual progress:
To get an impression of the work of rust removal, I made a short video when I was removing rust in the bow of the boat. This was in the beginning of February. I am so happy I got that part done! It was pretty difficult to find a good position to work there.
At the end of February I was getting the bedroom, the crazy cabinet and (for the most part) the bathroom ready.
And when I was working on that, I also made a very short video from painting the bedroom with anti-rust paint and dealing with the crazy cabinet. It is short because the videos were terrible haha… not so much to see, but I did my best to make it watchable.
At the beginning of March I was moving to the back of the boat and starting with the rust-removal there. I took some videos and put it together. Peter was removing the outlet of the old Mercedes Benz diesel motor that used to be in there, this was on the 3rd of March. He has replaced it with an electric motor. In the mean time it is out again, because we are preparing the machine room with anti-rust paint and epoxy filler so no water can stay in weird corners. The other videos (in the following YouTube video) are recorded on 8th, 13th and 18th of March.
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