New Year's Resolutions

Hey Everyone!
As you consider making New Year's Resolutions,
take 20 minutes to watch The Story of Stuff
What do you suppose an alpaca's new year's resolution is?
If you have an idea, leave it as a comment, we'll see how many we can come up with and I'll forward them to the alpaca farm here on the Vineyard and see if they happen in 2008.

Haulout 2007

What started as a long Thanksgiving weekend project turned into a 3 week project, due to weather, fume-induced sickness, added tasks such as reefing out old seams and putting in new cotton and seam compound, and attempts at perfection, which are near impossible on an old wooden boat.

Rick twirls the cotton to be pounded into the seams.

Some of High Country's seams had very little cotton left and seam compound that flaked away with a touch. That would explain the excessive leaking when on port tack last summer. Here, Rick uses a caulking mallet to pound in new cotton, to be followed with a soaking of red lead paint, then some seam compound.

Notice the very clear, blue-green water, almost Caribbean-like.

A nice day on the sunny side of the boat finds us having a quick lunch of jalapeno, chicken, potato soup before putting the first coat of bottom paint over the thin coat of red lead paint.

We like to use different colors for each coat of bottom paint for two reasons. The first reason is that then you are less likely to have "holidays" as you're painting and the second reason is then you can see when each coat has worn away and it's time to repaint.

We finished just in time. It snowed a beautiful snow the next day.

View of Vineyard Haven Harbor.


No pictures of High Country "splashing" because I was subbing in school when she slid back down the railway. She'll sit at a town mooring for the rest of winter, along with the rest of the wooden fleet, of which there are many here.
Next project: wooding the masts.