Week 6 (days 75-81) Back from the Hiatus. Doing nothing. It's delightful.

Day 75, Tuesday, February 18

The reverse of our trip out. Rental car to airport. Huge weather delays. Flights. Shuttle bus to a hotel. Shuttle back to the airport. Route 50 to Beach Park and Ride. Route 490 to the beach.

The starboard dinghy tube was almost flat when they brought her out. A little pumping and we’re back on board. 18 minutes of dinghy travel is (maybe) 5 oz. of propane.

Day 76

Tried to repair the dinghy tube. Ugh. Humidity makes the adhesives harden up in seconds. The instruction pamphlet and the videos all suggest you want 30 minutes for the first coat of glue to get tacky. It sets up so quickly, I can barely finish painting the glue on before it's dry where I started.

I tried again with the one-part adhesive I already had.

Somewhere, I thought I read that heat helps. So I brought out the heat gun and tried that to see if it helps. It changes things a bit. But. It never passes through tacky. It goes from wet to hard and dry.

I peeled off handfuls of rubber-cement boogers. I used the patch roller's handle to scrape off as much useless old glue as I could. Cursing and swearing the whole time.

I bought some expensive 2-part glue during the Hiatus. Mixed up 60cc's of adhesive (about 1/4 of the can) and what looked like about the right amount of harder (1/4 of the tiny glass bottle.)

The "pot life" was not 4 hours. It was less than an hour. I painted it all over tube and patch. I ran the heat gun on it, watching the glue bubbling on patch and tube. Then I slapped 'em together and mashed 'em up with the roller until parts of it felt like they were sticking.

Then I taped the edges down with Gorilla Tape.

It rained in the evening. Pretty serious rain. Kind of fun for us. We’ve seen some hellacious storms from Red Ranger. Mostly at anchor. A few -- like this -- from the relative security of a mooring ball.

Day 77, Thursday

Do mostly nothing.

Big plans. Weather will be very blustery tomorrow. Then, it should calm down, permitting us to do some laundry on Saturday or Sunday.

Day 78

Blustery. 10C. With wind chill feels like 4C. Can confirm. Going nowhere. Doing nothing.

(Well... Reading, Knitting, Extracting the legacy content from https://www.whitbybrewersailboats.com.)

Day 79, Saturday

Running low on laundry. And. Worse. Since I caught some lung crud, we really can’t prep and launch the dinghy. I'm too wrung out by coughing.

(We mask up at the security checkpoint for air travel. I think I shook one too many hands during the hiatus.)

CA busted out a bucket and washed a few things by hand. Maybe I’ll be strong enough to launch the dinghy tomorrow. We need to make a grocery run soon. Plus get 10 gal of fresh water for the starboard water tank. Three separate days, most likely.

Day 80, Sunday

Still not feeling 100%. But winds are down. Sea state is nearly flat.

Took the laundry in. One of the machines was out of order, so it took a bit longer than we’d expected. But. We have clean clothes, clean sheets, clean towels, and took lucious Hollywood showers.

Dinghy patch seemed to hold. I’m only inflating it to 2 ATM not 3. 17 min run time entered in my little spreadsheet along with the propane tank weight of about 23½ pounds after the trip.

Day 81

Cold and rainy in the morning. Then blustery and bouncy for the rest of the day. Really glad we got laundry and showers done yesterday. At night, we had a front pass through with 50 mph gusts and hellacious rain. Red Ranger gyrated wildly around the mooring ball.