HAUL OUT: Our gitup'n'go has got up and went!
December 22, 2006
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

On the travel lift.

We recently survived yet another haul out — five sunny days in Ashby's shipyard in Opua, windy and dusty as all get out, but road and yard will soon be hard surfaced we are assured. We were not doing any painting other than anti-fouling so it was no real problem for us. We were lucky this time: We remembered to ask the travel lift operator to let the boat down briefly so that the water blasters could clean under the straps. That alone spared us an hour or more of work. As usual, when put up in a shipyard we require no cradling and shoring up. We simply get them to perch us on four blocks in order to get us up a foot and a half or so off the ground so as to be able to paint under the keels and give ourselves some working space. We were glad of two extra days when they were unable to put us back into the water before the weekend. We needed the extra time as it turned out. There are always jobs to be done, dinghy bottom paint job included.

Bottom paint.

Now that we do a two-color anti-fouling job, we get two years protection out of it. We first roll on a layer of blue on black so that every "holiday" shows up and can be touched up before applying the final black coat. We are always surprised at just how much blue gleams through when we think we have done a thorough final paint application. Haul outs and paint are so expensive it pays to do the two year two color treatment rather than the tidal once-overs we made do with in days gone by — black on black applied in a rush between tides with insufficient drying time before wetting, resulting in barnacle build up in no time. This time we even treated ourselves to liquid gold SPEEDPROP on the propeller, said to last a full two years. Now that we seldom dive to de-barnacle the propeller it seems a great idea as the prop waxings we'd made do with protected for only a few months and necessitated dives or tidal hard stands — four since the last haul out. We are trying to simplify our life.

Painting the prop.

When the time came we could not find our carefully stowed zinc anodes so finally bought two more large zincs, one for each keel. When Michel was drilling the metal straps, a fisherman neighbor offered him a sharper drill bit. "It's not the drill bit," Michel said. "It's the muscles of the operator." The spares, less than half the cost of the new ones, showed up a few days after we got back in the water.

Drilling keel zincs.

It took us longer to recover from this haul out than it did to get the jobs done. We had become exhausted doing what we could once have done in less than half the time. Climbing a twelve foot ladder countless times each day, working over our heads, crouching and bending, rendered us utterly drained. It cannot have helped that I underwent a major abominable abdominal operation five months before. I thought I was as good as ever attributing it to our life enhancing life style. After all, I was back aboard two weeks after the operation, up and down Cardiac Track, in and out of the dinghy, up and over the lifelines, driving the car and all. But more was taken out of me than I had realized — fortunately none of it malignant. I now call my op "my oompherectomy".

Jane the foreman.

As always it was interesting in the shipyard meeting our fellow shipyard inmates, a varied lot. Also being close to the Opua Marina and the Cruising Club is good value. We enjoy chatting up the polyglot arrivals, finding out about their adventures. The new Opua Cruising Clubhouse is nearing completion on pilings over the water. Let's hope the acoustics will be better than in the last clubhouse!

To change the subject, Michel says he cannot wait for the warming of the planet. Here in Northland NZ it has brought us colder drier weather so far this southern summer, and weird happenings make us realize that times they are a-changing. Huge ice bergs broken off from glaciers in Antarctica are drifting north as far as coastal Otago South Island, before breaking up and melting. Monster jelly fish, the size of dining room tables, have stranded on the coast of Great Barrier Island. Poisonous spiders are making their way from Australian drought-stricken lands to heretofore poison-animal-free NZ. A white tailed spider must have sheltered in Michel's night cap and panicked when he pulled it onto his head. He awoke one morning with multiple bites between his eyebrows which burgeoned into a monster Vesuvius protuberance (now a crater) and lesser ones on his eyelid which still show pincer punctures, three pairs in a row. We were fortunate it was not far worse.