Dry Dock One Week

 esterday meant we have been up on the hard for a week.  Things slowed down a bit after those first couple of days.  We hired a guy to sand and paint the hull above the water line.  The purpose here is not to get a pretty job.  Just to get underneath the existing stuff.  It will all come off during our major dry out when we get on the hard in Mexico.  But we, or rather Mark, couldn’t stand her looking as bad as she was with sheets of paint peeling off and blisters everywhere.  Eight years in the Alaskan rainforest has taken their toll on her paint and varnish work.  We hired Pio, mainly for his tool.  Mark was scraping and sanding with a random orbital and was watching the guy next door working with his Festool.  The guy with the super tool was taking things down quickly.  We went to look at buying a Festool (they aren’t cheap) and the guy said he would do the job for us for the price of the tool.  So we bit in.  Of course that means we are working around his schedule.  But things are moving quickly again.  The bottom paint is mostly sanded and ready for stuff to go back on.  The Blue stripe should get painted today and the white within two to three more days.  The new Cranse Iron is fitted and the bobstay fitting is ready to go on.  We are just waiting for some custom bolts to be made.  The forestay rigging is ordered.  Unfortunately the top toggle is a custom piece and there is a delay on it.  That won’t stop us from going in the water.  But we can’t leave until it is back up.  The green mainmast is white again.  We used a whole tub of Clorox wipes to clean the mold off!  We were struggling to find a carpenter not too booked up to repair our damaged rub rail.  Pio has said he and another guy can fix that so hopefully that will get done first part of next week.  The flex part for the exhaust mixer riser is in.  Waiting for an elbow on that and then it should be welded up soon.  So all in all it looks like we will be on the hard a week longer than we expected but that should be it.