Fresh water has been a problem for us so far. The built-in fiberglass tank was badly affected by venting blisters, and as of last summer, we weren’t content to drink water from it any more. We tried using Sanitred to fix it, which was a complete disaster!! Never ever use Sanitred products on your boat!!!
This has been a funny season so far. In our wintertime dreams, we planned to leave in May to head north. But one thing after another has held us up (some of it was work related so a reasonable excuse). When a friend from NYC called and said – “hey, we’re in Friday Harbor for work, want to meet us for dinner in three days?” I said – “YES, we’ll sail there!”
We hauled Rainshadow at Sea Marine in Port Townsend for a week, starting June 13th. We had a nice stay there. Sea Marine pushed a staircase along side the boat, so I could climb aboard (I certainly would not be able to climb a ladder). So we lived aboard on the hard, and worked on her every day. Weather was pleasant enough (read, very little rain) – it was a nice “vacation” even though Van slaved away on the boat non-stop.
It’s been a long cold and wet winter. Finally, the 3rd week of April has had some reasonable sailing weather – good wind and not-so-cold temperatures (mid 50’s F). So we took Rainshadow out for a day sail, and had a wonderful time.
Yes, it’s true – we bought new sails! Though our original plan was to try to make our own sails – we decided to go with the professionals. I’ll give a review of how everything went.
We just noticed that Rainshadow has a bunch of small cracks on the topsides near the toe rail. Yikes!
This cruise was special, not only because it was the end of summer cruise with great fall weather, but because it was the first trip of our new sails – yes, that’s right. Rainshadow has a new set of skirts!
The problem was that our fiberglass fresh water tank (located in the keel under the cockpit sole, about 100 gallons volume) was blistered and had spider cracks. It was still sound, but the water quality was poor due to the styrene leaching into the water from the venting blisters.
We figured we had the following repair options:
My last posting ended with a question – will our guest crew turn out to be lubberly or salty? After nearly a week in the San Juans, the answer is – Jonathan, Lianne, Chris and Max all get high marks as sailors!
Our dear friends from the UK have arrived to join us for summer fun during the month of August. Too bad the weather is a bit grey and dodgy, but maybe it will improve.