We trust everyone at home is gorging themselves on the traditional Thanksgiving meal, we miss you and would love to eat ourselves into a food coma with you today! Instead we are celebrating by paying someone else to sand the bottom paint off Pisces, thereby saving us hours of standing in a cloud of toxic copper-based paint dust, it's well worth the cost.

Equally as exciting as having the bottom sanded is that we are in the home stretch of our monster rudder/skeg project. Here is a bit of a recap of the steps we undertook to rebuild the skeg:

1) Grind...grind...grind...angle grinder with 24 grit disks...lots of disks...

2) Have a brief freakout about how much fiberglass we took off of the hull of the boat.

3) Apply 6 layers of medium weight fiberglass cloth with epoxy.

4) 2 coats of unthickened epoxy to fill the final weave.

5) Dry fit the rudder, mark hole positions.

6) Drill out all thru-bolt hulls oversize (3/4") and fill with chopped fiberglass and epoxy.

7) Patch small hole where we got too enthusiastic with an orbital sander.

8) Re-fit rudder, drill bolt holes.

9) Apply 3 layers of epoxy barrier coat (generously donated by a fellow cruiser!).

10) Go to local bar, check internet and write this blog.

11) Put rudder in place, seal bolts with 4200.






That's all for now, today we are going to dinghy out to Tao, grill some arrachera and enjoy being on the water. Miss you all!

As most boat projects tend to, this one has cascaded a bit, and what was originally a rudder repair has now also turned into a rudder skeg rebuild. (For those of you who don't know, a rudder skeg is the bit at the bottom of the hull where the rudder attaches).

As we mentioned in a previous post, we decided to have IdaSailor Marine make our new heel fitting before we came back down to Pisces. We raved a bit in the previous post, so I'll be brief, but IdaSailor did a fantastic job. There was a slight hiccup in the production schedule, but Joel at IdaSailor was completely on top of it, and went way out of his way to ensure that we had the piece in our hands before we were in Mexico. I think that in some ways this is a better testament to their great customer service than if everything had gone completely smoothly, there was a slight problem, but they were all over it and made it right. On top of the great customer service, the fitting is a real piece of art, and we've already gotten a lot of interest in it around the boat yard.

While the advantage of having this piece built ahead of time was that it supposedly minimizes boat yard time, the disadvantage is that we didn't have access to the boat for accurate measurements, so we more or less guessed at sizing (we had very rough estimates, but that's it).

As it turned out, I ended up spending about 15 hours in the last week with an angle grinder, full tyvek suit, respirator, standing three feet deep in a hole (I know the guy if you need a hole dug in the Mexican desert), grinding the hell out of our rudder skeg. We got everything in the right shape, and have been doing some serious fiberglassing work to make our new shape permanent and watertight. So far so good, we've got 6 layers of medium weight glass & epoxy on, and will be putting some finishing coats on tomorrow or the next day. Everything is looking great, and in the end will definitely be a big improvement on what it was before, but this project has definitely been huge, perhaps the biggest one we've done yet. You know you're in trouble when a day laborer comes by and tells you 'mucho trabajo'!

We've been at Pisces for two days now, and everything is going smoothly, and we are happy that Pisces seems to have weathered the summer incredibly well. The batteries (wet cells) didn't even need to be topped off!

We spent yesterday making the interior livable, and today we did some fiberglass work on the rudder, got the yard to dig a hole, dry fit the rudder, and even managed to get some other miscellaneous tasks taken care of.

Here's a picture for proof:


More to come soon, we're having a goodbye dinner tonight for Jeff & Claire who drove us and all our stuff to Mexico in an air cooled 78 HP 1981 VW Vanagon...way to take one (actually a whole bunch) for the team!

We are headed back to Pisces in the morning, almost everything is packed, and we managed to get a few last minute purchases in...including our new anchor.

We've included Tao's new primary anchor in the photo for comparison purposes.



Okay, don't worry, that's actually a dinghy anchor.