(no subject)
So I took my day off to help dad clean the bottom of the boat. Great use of my quality time, eh?
First off, we still have problems with the starter, so the boat had to remain in the marina while we cleaned it. Now, this marina is not the sparkley nicely laid-out open marinas that you see on the intercoastal. This is a marina 15 minutes into a detour from port everglades. Not much flow in or out, so the water gets...how to describe this....eyuurrggh. Yep, that's about what it is. Definitely eyuurrggh. People don't bother getting their waste tanks pumped out here. They pump it overboard. This is the majority of what me and dad had to scrub off of the hull, and for those of you who haven't seen the boat, there is a LOT of hull.
One lucky point was that it was slack high tide. The water was at it's deepest point, so the thick layer of....eyuurrggh....was as far from our working space as possible. The downside was that there was no water flow whatsoever to carry away all the muck we were scraping off. And since the bottom of the boat is coincidentally located on it's bottom, we just happened to be under what we were scraping off. This is why I had on my full wetsuit, hood, gloves, boots, and had all the seals taped shut. It didn't help for long.
Suffice to say it took us about 3 hours of scraping with metal scrapers and wire brushes to make it serviceably clean again. The next hour was spent cutting the tape seals off myself with my knife, peeling out of the suit, blasting myself off with 2 garden hoses and a refill bottle of dial antibac soap, listening to the crackle of hydrogen peroxide in my ears, drinking 1/3rd of a bottle of mouthwash, and taking no less than 3 showers. I may never feel clean again.
Hopefully this coming weekend I can FINALLY dive again, assuming no hurricanes, tropical storms / depressions, financial roadblocks, crazy overtime hours, transportation problems, lack of buddies, or equipment failures decide to derail my dive plans (ex: the last 8 weeks). This is also assuming I don't contract some rabid ear infection or bizarre disease that managed to slip past the antibacterial hellstorm I put myself through today.
Oh, and one last thing: From today forward this journal is dive-only. For the personal stuff, go here:
http://profiles.myspace.com/users/7700461
First off, we still have problems with the starter, so the boat had to remain in the marina while we cleaned it. Now, this marina is not the sparkley nicely laid-out open marinas that you see on the intercoastal. This is a marina 15 minutes into a detour from port everglades. Not much flow in or out, so the water gets...how to describe this....eyuurrggh. Yep, that's about what it is. Definitely eyuurrggh. People don't bother getting their waste tanks pumped out here. They pump it overboard. This is the majority of what me and dad had to scrub off of the hull, and for those of you who haven't seen the boat, there is a LOT of hull.
One lucky point was that it was slack high tide. The water was at it's deepest point, so the thick layer of....eyuurrggh....was as far from our working space as possible. The downside was that there was no water flow whatsoever to carry away all the muck we were scraping off. And since the bottom of the boat is coincidentally located on it's bottom, we just happened to be under what we were scraping off. This is why I had on my full wetsuit, hood, gloves, boots, and had all the seals taped shut. It didn't help for long.
Suffice to say it took us about 3 hours of scraping with metal scrapers and wire brushes to make it serviceably clean again. The next hour was spent cutting the tape seals off myself with my knife, peeling out of the suit, blasting myself off with 2 garden hoses and a refill bottle of dial antibac soap, listening to the crackle of hydrogen peroxide in my ears, drinking 1/3rd of a bottle of mouthwash, and taking no less than 3 showers. I may never feel clean again.
Hopefully this coming weekend I can FINALLY dive again, assuming no hurricanes, tropical storms / depressions, financial roadblocks, crazy overtime hours, transportation problems, lack of buddies, or equipment failures decide to derail my dive plans (ex: the last 8 weeks). This is also assuming I don't contract some rabid ear infection or bizarre disease that managed to slip past the antibacterial hellstorm I put myself through today.
Oh, and one last thing: From today forward this journal is dive-only. For the personal stuff, go here:
http://profiles.myspace.com/users/7700461