What's in a name?

One last thing to do, before moving aboard was to launch the newly made-over beauty to see if she’d float. Our concern was that (in an unlikely and unwelcome event) all of the new thru-hull fittings might leak and we would need extra days on the hard to sort any such issues out. Ever since moving onto our first boat Rodeo, in 2011, I’ve learnt that unlikely and unwelcome events are a rather common occurrence in the life of a live-aboard, thus it didn’t strike me as unusual to find that one of the thru-hulls, the new and improved fridge water cooling fitting, was indeed making water. After the boat was lowered into the launching well, we climbed aboard to check all new fittings for signs of intrusion, and found just that one. The sluggish penetration didn’t pose an immediate threat to our new home, but we don’t want to see a single drop of water coming into this boat uninvited, so we asked the yard manager if he could kindly lift us back up and let us fix the problem. Hoisting the boat up was not an issue, but we couldn’t stay in the sling, because the yard had to use it to get another boat out of the water, so back on the jack stands we went for another day. 
Immediately after getting set down, Gabe got to work on sussing out the culprit. Confirmed by the critical eye of an experienced boat manager, it was diagnosed that the seal on the new fridge thru-hull fitting had let go when Gabe was tightening its elements together. The hole that was drilled out for the part to fit into was 1/8” too big, even though it was made to manual specifications, so we had to figure out a way to make it smaller. Gabe set out to make a ring out of fibreglass that would occupy the void between the cylinder body of the fitting and the hull, reducing the space that the sealant had to fill and caulk. 
The new set up fit like a glove, making it easier to tighten the assembly together and getting it real snug against the hull, which, theoretically, meant less probability of a leak. But we would have to wait and see. 

I breathed a sigh of relief as Maracujá splashed into the cold waters of Cape Fear River for the second time that week, and we found no leaks. She swayed gracefully under the big lift while we ran the motor for a bit, warming her up before we zoomed out of the confines of the launch well, and into the rapid current of the river. Her place for the next few months is at a dock slip, down stream from where we launched, and though it wasn’t a long trek we were apprehensive about manouvering a boat we’ve never driven before through the strong current and into the docking slip. As much as it gnawed at our egos to have somebody else bring our boat that short distance and dock it, we let Al, the boat yard manager and a skilled skipper, use his knowledge of the finicky river and navigate the boat down stream to her new spot. 

Maracujá settled into it without resistance, and a docking that goes without a hitch is always a cause for celebration. Having dispensed pats on the backs and many thanks to the staff of Bennett Brothers Yachs, we tied up securely with brand new dock lines and adjusted a set of new fenders to keep the boat well cushioned agains bangs and scratches. Next we started to make our new dwelling feel more comfortable with heaters and braced ourselves for a few cold weeks on the water, while we waited to depart for the second leg of Gabe’s contract in Colombia. North Carolina is usually graced with a pretty moderate winter, where on majority of days the temperatures hover around 5-12C, but it has been anything but a usual winter for most of the States, and Canada as well. We’ve seen temperatures of -16C one day and +18C the next. 

When confined to the interior of the boat on those dreary days we finished up some of the outstanding projects inside. On the warmer days we re-bed some deck fixtures that needed attention, cut a new companion way slat and fit a new set of lock hasps to keep the boat secure while we’re away. Most importantly, though, we put the new boat name on the stern and baptized her as Maracujá. First we had to un-name the boat, by purging her of all signs of her previous identity, any item bearing her previous name (of which we will never speak again) had to be removed and cast away as no longer belonging to the boat. We conducted an informal, yet pertinent ceremony of throwing an emblem bearing the old name overboard then pouring red wine, representing blood of a virgin, over the four sides of her deck and into the depths of the waters upon which she is now to float as a vessel reborn. The following day, having given Neptune enough time to digest our offerings, we dedicated Maracujá and her new crew to the gods of sea and wind, invoking their powers to guide and protect us. This, of course, was a ceremony drenched in Champagne and flattery for the forces of nature to which we were committing our new home and our lives. 

Finally we were able to adorn the boat’s stern with her new name. 
We could have kept the old one, which would be the auspicious thing to do, as changing the name of a boat is often perceived as bad luck. But we just couldn't stomach Muirgueasa. It has a nice ring to it when pronounced properly: Morrissey, but we haven't met anyone who knew to do so simply by looking at the spelling. Maracujá, which is the native Brazilian word for passion fruit has a beautiful ring to it and means a lot to us in terms of the life style we've chosen. To us the boat is the fruit of our love of adventure, discovery and a simpler life shared with friends and family, all things we feel passionate about. 


And thus she sits, primped and poised, awaiting our return from Colombia. 

The nitty gritty

As much as we'd like to think that most of the heavy lifting is behind us now, Gabe and I recognize that Maracujá is far from the pristine vessel we envision her to be, as we glance over the nicks and scratches on the heavily oxidized hull. A ship's hull becomes oxidized as UV rays, oxygen and environmental pollutants degrade the top layer of the gel coat. Washing a boat and applying protective wax regularly is essential to keeping her topsides looking good. Our boat hadn't seen that kind of service in years, it seems, and we hoped we could do something to lift her tired look.

 

We just knew that the sparkling, crisp white of the hull was hiding under that hazy coat of neglect and all it would take was a bit more elbow grease to bring the best out of her exterior. We waited for 2 full days of warm, sunny weather and began the excavation. What we uncovered, though, surprised us. After scrubbing the boat thoroughly with biodegradable soap and water, Gabe began by applying a 3M cutting compound with a large pad on a polishing machine. The cutting compound is designed to lift a thin layer of the existing finish, removing the oxidation and distributing microscopic particles of the finish to fill imperfections.

Just a few passes of the machine and we knew that the back breaking effort was going to pay off.

I worked the same compound by hand into the area near the freshly painted boot stripe at the waterline, to avoid lifting the new black paint and working it into the white of the hull. We worked in unison as a team, like we always do, getting all of the hull done by the end of day one. The boat already looked a million times better, but she needed a coat of polishing wax to seal the gel coat to prevent it from degrading and give her a real nice shine. Seeing this enormous improvement we came to work the next day with enthusiasm. It was going to be another hard day of arms over head, rubbing and buffing, moving the heavy scaffolding around the boat. We called it our "cross fit". A hell of a work out, pulling the metal structure around, climbing up and down both it and the access latter to get up on the boat. But it was going to be really worth the effort. Maracujá deserved this facelift.
At the end of day two, exhausted but exhilarated, Gabe and I admired the transformation.

Before

After

The times we waited for weather to cooperate with our exterior projects, Gabe and I tended to some business inside. The business of putting in new, fresh water toilets that is.
And the dirty business of replacing all the rotten, old plumbing, cleaning one of the existing holding tanks and replacing one of them with a new one.

    Testing out the comfort level of our new heads       Poopy plumbing

We yanked out the existing, clunky fridge assembly that was an energy guzzler and replaced it with a new, water cooled system that draws salt water through a special seacock to cool the heat exchanger and keep the small O-plate working as a freezer, while cooling the rest of the ice box to function as a fridge. Simple and efficient. I had to dive deep into the ice box to clean all of its crevasses before I deemed it acceptable for use. Gabe’s parents joked that there must have been a bottle of vodka hiding at the bottom, when they saw the photo below (centre). I found pretty much everything but a bottle of vodka glued to the mucky, grimy deposit on the walls of the fridge, including a collection of metal caps from unpalatable American beers. The previous owner was clearly not a Polak and lacked the taste for finer things. 

Along with outdated refrigeration out went seized seacocks, disintegrating engine hoses, a broken water heater, an inadequate electrical panel, a degraded galley sink drains, and a rusty ole’ stove; all replaced with a new lot. 

Little by little we see our boat reveal herself for the modern, energy and space efficient cruising boat that she’s meant to be.

The space we reclaimed in the work shop
after removing the old boiler. Yes, our boat
has a work shop!

Burnt fuses
on old AC panel

New electrical-AC panel under way

My shiny new toy

Another brief from the battlefield

Some days I consider the enormity of the challenge we've undertaken and I wonder how we got ourselves into this pickle. The boat, a 43' Wauquiez, Amphitrite, seems nearly twice the size of our old one and that means twice the problems, twice the expense, twice the work. For the most part, though, I focus on the finished product and the promise of future adventures, new discoveries and memories made with friends and family that we are sure to have aboard this good ship... and then I wonder how we got so lucky. As much work and frustration picking this boat apart and putting her back together may be, it is a labour of love conceived by a dream of living off the hook, and I tell you, it is worth every drop of sweat, blood and tears.
We have been tackling "The Refit" more less project by project, staggering them a bit when we had to wait on weather or supplies being delivered.
While obliterating the hideous rub rail, we also started to remove old port lights and began the installation of a new swim platform. This new addition to the boat was a must. It will make accessing the water from the high decks much easier than just by latter, particularly with dive gear. It is to be raised and secured while underway then lowered for use at anchor.
I drafted a preliminary drawing of the platform based on some blueprints of another Amphitrite, I found online. I did this when we were in Colombia, so taking measurements of our actual boat wasn't an option. I had to make some assumptions about angles and accessibility on the interior to bolt the platform frame through the hull, but the final tweaking could be done on site, once we returned Stateside.

I sent the drawing to a few metal fabricators in the Wilmington area for quotes and passed it along to the Bennett Brothers Yachts manager, Al Nobel, to have him help source out a fabricator. He passed the drawing along to Robert King of King's Marine, who got started right away. Ay ay ay! We didn't know this until we got back here, and I was worried that Robert got carried away with a project that we weren't sure was going to fit our actual boat, but the scaled drawing I made from the found blueprints turned out to be pretty accurate and Robert had no trouble fitting what he had built so far to the shape of the hull.

While we waited for all the platform parts to be done, we began to take on the port lights. We read other Wauquiez owners report on their own port light projects and it seemed pretty straight forward. From the inside: gain access to nuts under decorative window frames. On the outside: remove aluminium frames, screwed into the Lexan window pane. Remove the bolts that hold the pane in place, then release the window from it's place in the hull. Clean up sealant, re-bed, remount and reseal the new window in place. Easy peasy, right?
Right. Well it turned out to be a bit more of a pain in the transom than we anticipated. First we found that very few of the nuts fastened to the bolts were accessible, let alone visible once the plastic covers were removed from around the windows.

 

The boat manufacturer probably assumed these would never have to be replaced and they didn't leave any access around the window to get to the fasteners. Seriously?

Reluctantly, we started to drill out access holes in the teak paneling around the port lights. Some nuts turned out to be easy to loosen, some were fiberglassed right into the hull and some missing altogether. It was frustrating to learn that the builder was so neglectful in how they put these windows together. Patiently, though, we were able to expose all of the fasteners and we could now focus on pulling the assembly apart.

After unscrewing aluminium frames on the exterior we loosened the bolts that held each pane in place, pulled them out and got ready to pry each Lexan windows out of the moulded cut-out they were bedded into. This required that we first loosen the holding grip of the Silicone bedding, which was a very tedious and messy affair. Silicone don't let go so easy, did you know? We used a great product we researched and bought from a producer right here in North Carolina called Re-Mov. We scraped and rubbed the silicone off, layer by layer, until all of its gooey nastiness was gone.

Cleaning and prepping the cutouts for new port lights took close to 2 hours each, and we have 13 of them altogether. First we only did two port lights per day, as we took time to figure out the process and the materials we were working with. But once we got a hang of it things went more smoothly and we were able to remove and replace the last 5 windows in one day. Each pane had to be cut out of a 3/8" sheet of high quality Lexan, which is a more resilient and flexible type of polycarbonate, like Plexi.

One of the new aft cabin windows being fastened to the hull

When we had the rough shape of each window cut out, we routed them using old windows as templates, beveled the interior edge to follow the curvature of the moulded opening they fit into and drilled holes for new stainless steel bolts to go into. Each individual Lexan window was then set in place using double-sided 3M VHB tape, made to withstand adverse weather conditions. Once in place, each port light was bolted through and tightened, then sealed using a UV resistant Sikaflex bedding compound, meant to create a watertight seal between the Lexan window and the hull. Done and done!

Meanwhile, when waiting for sealant to dry or for new Lexan shipment to come in, we focused on getting the swim platform in place.
Mounting it turned out to be less complicated than we thought, which is always a nice surprise and a boost to crew morale. The platform comes in two parts: the brace which fastens to the hull and the swivelled platform, which lower up and down, and because we could separate it, it was easier to mount the brace to the transom on its own and then attach the swivelling platform part to it.

Robert, the metal guy did a great job putting the design together and custom made all bolts and backing plates we needed to finish the installation. Having marked the location for each thru hull bolt, Gabe drilled them out while I cut access panels on the inside where the backing plates would go.

After bedding all surfaces with Sikaflex sealant we fed the robust 1/2" bolts through the holes, through the backing plates, and fastened them in place from the inside. Once the sealant cured we were ready to hang the rest of the platform, complete with 3/4" Starboard planks to form the platform surface. Voila!

Routing a bevel in Starboard edges for a smooth bare foot friendly finish

Drop dead gorgeous drop platform is done!

The Refit

Last night with the Mitú bunch at Barassan

We left Mitú and all we had come to love about it in a typical fashion. Typical to us, that is. Gabe was on the ball about getting all the luggage together, checking out of Los Paisas Hotel, checking in at the airport, thinking strategically about the next few days of travel. I was a slobbering mess. Mumbling tearful goodbyes in broken language to our Colombian and Brazilian friends, spilling a salty river of heartbreak on a dusty airport floor over Princess, Marcela's dog, who had become a dear companion during our stay, sobbing uncontrollably at the thought of leaving the underestimated charm of it all behind and never coming back. It is a distinct possibility that we may not return to Mitú, at least not any time soon, and I was struggling with the realization of it as we filed, single line past security, through metal detectors and out into the sweltering heat of the regional airport runway. The big hearts of our little Mitú community behind terminal windows, waving sadly in our direction, the same hopeful expectations of our next encounter painted on their faces as on ours. Salud amigos!

Nearly two months have gone bye now, during which time we have been hard at work bringing our recently purchased boat out of the oblivion of neglect that she has endured in the last 15 years. After purchasing the boat in July we commissioned Bennett Brothers Yachts to start stripping the epoxy coating and any layers of fibreglass necessary to release moisture trapped in the hull under the water line.

Here she is as we left her in North Carolina. Still bearing the old name Muirgheasa (yeah, exactly), an old Gaelic form of the name Morrissey, which happens to be the previous owner's last name. It is said to signify a brave, skilled seafarer. We like the name al right, but it's not significant to us and we found that no one ever knew how to pronounce it, just by looking at the name, so off it goes. New name TBA

The boat sat for a few months out in the open air with her bottom exposed to the warm breeze of North Carolina autumn, and by the time we arrived it dried out enough for the experts here to start building up the missing layer back up. They slapped on a few good layers of filling compound,  which was faired out to create a smooth, aqua-dynamic surface. This in turn was covered with a three coats of epoxy primer and then painted with two coats of antifouling bottom paint. Sounds simple enough, but it was a weeks long process sanding, slapping on compound, fairing, sanding, slapping on more goop, fairing and sanding again, rolling on epoxy, sanding and finally painting. We are eternally grateful to the BBY boat yard crew for their hard work and their professionalism.

Pip and Tucker putting a coat of epoxy on

While all this was going on Gabe and I started to work on the topsides and deck.
Our challenges were as follows:
1. An obtrusive teak rub rail, which was not original to the boat, now rotting and bringing water into the hull through bad seals and giant rusted wood screws that were used to mount it to the hull.
2. Crazed, leaky port lights.
3. Various leaks through deck fittings and poorly bedded fasteners.
4. A new swim platform.
5. Heavily oxidized hull paint.


1. The Raunchy Rub Rail
Gabe wanted that thing off as soon as he saw it, the first time we came to Wrightsville Beach to view the boat. It stood out like a sore thumb, painted Rust-Oleum green, cutting the elegant lines of the hull in half. I was afraid that pulling it off might damage the surrounding paint, as we noted that the original gelcoat had been painted, up to and around the intrusive rub rail. This meant that while we try to pry the rail off, with all the sealant and epoxy that had been forced into the gaps between the wood and the fibreglass hull, we might chip parts of the "new" paint, that has been laid over the sealed joints between the two materials.

We decided to strip whatever paint was on the rail and see what's hiding underneath. After taping the hull top and bottom, to protect its surface from the paint stripper we applied a generous coat of Citristrip paint stripper on the wood rail. We decided to use Citristrip because it is a gentler formula that is biodegradable and stays wet up to 24 hours, which we used to our advantage by taping plastic sheets to the treated wood and letting the product work overnight. It took up to three applications in some areas and a good deal of scraping and sanding to get what looked like 4 layers of paint off the rail.

Some sections of the rub rail were in good shape, solid. Some not so much. Stripping and scraping more and more of the rail revealed rotted areas that have been epoxied before, by the previous owners, to arrest the rotting and help the wood retain its structural integrity. We researched some products and techniques that would allow us to draw the moisture out of the rot, kill the living spores, seal and build up the damaged wood fibres so that we could salvage the dreadful thing. Yet, as we progressed, we started to discover areas of wet rot and compromised seal that allowed water into and through the hull by the way of rusted wood screws.

After a week of battling gummy paint and dried up caulking we decided to pull the damn thing off altogether.

We drilled out the bungs covering the screw heads that held it tight to the hull then scraped out as much of the sealant from the edges as possible. Next we sprayed the gap between the rub rail  and the hull with a silicone and adhesive remover to try and break the seal between them. After that we began to drive out the 3" wood screws out and watched our formidable opponent, the rub rail, spring away from the hull like it was being repelled by a great force. In our minds, the rail was never meant to be there and the boat expelled it from its body with a sigh of relief that we echoed as we hoisted the dead wood down to the ground.

After cleaning up the area where the rub rail used to be with more adhesive remover we filled the screw holes with epoxy. The strip of exposed gelcoat left behind was indeed different tone than the rest of the hull and we had to find a solution to marry the two shades of white together.

We chose not to try to match the paint colour, but rather paint an accent stripe along the rub rail gap. After fairing the damaged parts with a fairing compound we sanded a 3" strip to prep it for painting with a Platinum Grey a Petit Easypoxy topside paint that ties in nicely with the stainless steel and aluminum elements on the boat. The final result turned out even better than we expected. The stripe adds a nice visual detail to the broad hull surface area without chopping it up in two halves, the way the clunky rub rail did.
While prepping for and painting the new rub rail strip we slopped on a new boot stripe as well. The deep forest green which went so wonderfully with the existing name lettering and the rub rail wasn't our taste so out with the old and in with the new we went, a black and white striping that will go a lot nicer with the colour scheme we have picked out for the boat. More on that later.

Next we tackle port lights...