Evanston: swallowed a duck
Evanston: swallowed a duck
Rain pattering on the chimney cap, not the deck. A metallic sound, mixed with thunder and Beethoven’s String Quartet #8. Although the sun nominally rose an hour ago, the sky is still dark, except when briefly illuminated by lightning.
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I enjoyed the mile walk from the train stop at Winthrop Harbor--there is no station--to Skipper Bud’s, which as some of you may recall is along an access road crossing a marshland nature reserve which is a paradise for birds, though not the true paradise for birds New Zealand was before we arrived with other pests.
I was excited to see GANNET again after almost six months. She has survived the mild winter unscathed. Her deck wasn’t even dirty. I had only to remove a dead bee from the cockpit.
Down below I found a couple of drops of fluid had trickled from two re-enforcing elbows fiberglassed to the overhead in the forepeak, but no water damage. Less than an inch of water was in the bilge. Thus far GANNET seems not to leak.
I changed into old clothes, put on latex gloves, opened the first pint of isopropyl alcohol and went to work. A layer of VC17 came off fairly easily, taking me down to a hard red bronze surface that did not come off easily. The problem was that not having applied the paint myself, I didn’t know what I was looking for. I should have emailed the former owner before I started, though it might not have made much difference that day.
After rubbing at the hard layer ineffectively for a while, I moved on, and over the next three hours removed what I could from GANNET’s hull, using six pints of isopropyl and eight rolls of paper towels. Plastic scouring pads and Magic Erasers also worked, but only pushed the softened paint around rather than absorbed it.
One of the best things about small boats is that they are small.
THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s underwater surface area is three or four times greater than GANNET’s. I was very glad not to be working on HAWKE.
After a lunch break, I went back over the hull again. This only took forty-five minutes. My paper towels still came up red, but the progress on the remaining hard surface was slow and I had a train to catch.
Yesterday I emailed Steve, GANNET’s owner when she was GROWLER, asking if he knew what the boat’s bottom gel coat color is and what has been applied on top of it. He replied quickly, saying the gel coat is the same wheat color as the topsides, but that I probably wouldn’t be able to see it through a gray epoxy anti-osmosis barrier coat. Above that is only VC17. He suggested that what came off easily was the oxidized surface of the VC17. So I need to get down to gray, small patches of which you can see in the photo above.
Isopropyl doesn’t have much effect on the remaining VC17, thin filmed though it may be.
The paint manufacturer recommends sanding, which is out of the question with my eye, even with a vacuum sander.
Steve provided a link to a Sailing Anarchy forum thread about removing VC17. I can’t use some of the strippers suggested because there is no source of water near GANNET to flush the hull to stop the process.
I’m going to soak a plastic scouring pad in alcohol and see how hard I have to scrub to remove the remaining paint.
I’m also going to try acetone.
And then something called Xylol, which I’ll have to order online as it does not appear to be available locally.
Working on GANNET here is discouragingly inefficient compared to working on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA at Ashley’s Boat Yard in Opua. There I am on the boat and have only to climb down a ladder to get started. Any supplies I need are available at a well-stocked chandlery a three minute walk away. Here I have a three hour round trip commute and no convenient source of anything I don’t already have with me. And for a variety of reasons I cannot work on the boat daily.
My ambitions for what I might accomplish before GANNET’s scheduled launch date are diminishing.
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One of the reasons I can’t work on GANNET every day is the weather. Another is my right eye which has developed complications.
Briefly, after improving some through last December, recently my vision has severely deteriorated due to glaucoma and I am going to have to have another surgery.
If you are interested in more detail, it follows; if not, skip to the next section.
When I went to my retinal surgeon for a routine follow-up on Tuesday the intraocular pressure in my right eye was 40. This is measured in millimeters of Mercury, as is the barometer. Normal is 10 to 22 mm.
He gave me some medication that reduced it to 32 before I left his office and referred me to a glaucoma specialist, an impressive young man I saw yesterday.
The lens in that eye, which is artificial having been replaced during cataract surgery in January of last year, is pressed tight against the cornea, blocking the normal ducts through which fluid flows from inside the eye which has caused the pressure to increase dangerously.
A common procedure in retinal repair surgery is to sew what is called a buckle to the eye, compressing it in the middle to relieve traction on the retina. Apparently in my case, the buckle also forced the lens forward.
The glaucoma specialist told me that damage to the optic nerve caused by glaucoma is not reversible. That if nothing is done, complete blindness in that eye is certain. Two types of surgery are possible: inserting a shunt that will act as an artificial drain; or use a laser to remove some of the structures that create fluid in the eye.
I don’t have much vision in that eye. Less than 10%. Maybe less than 5%. I asked about having it removed. He does not want to do that unless I’m in pain, which I’m not.
While I don’t know that the remaining vision in my right eye is worth preserving, I have another appointment on Monday. I have already decided to agree to whatever surgery he suggests.
I told him, and he appeared to understand, that while I am old, I am not retired. I have things to do and oceans to sail and don’t want to give up much more time to this failed orb.
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While riding the train to downtown Chicago for my medical appointment yesterday--north the day before to GANNET; south yesterday to the doctor--I read the following in the translator’s introduction to a Swedish novel, THE LONG SHIPS:
But I fear that like most true adventurers, she also saw, looking back, that grief overtopped joy, that trash obscured the treasure, that, in the end, the bad luck outweighed the good.
I have often been called an adventurer, and, except for trash obscuring treasure, I don’t find the other assertions at all true. Repeatedly I have been struck by the opposite: grief and pain diminish with time while joy remains golden; and while “time and chance happeneth to all men,” for most of us luck is even.
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In the doctor’s waiting room I leafed through a copy of THE NEW YORKER in which I found a cartoon of a waiter holding two bottles of wine for a couple to inspect. He is saying, “I recommend you take both the red and the white: your fish may have swallowed a duck.”
Friday, March 30, 2012