Saturday 1 January 2011

Picton Castle at sea; Saturday 1 January 2011 סב"ד

Woke up at 0630, wrote my logs, breakfast, work. Jobs today included:

- greasing the following: rudder post thrust bearings; lower topsl sheet turning blocks; lift blocks; course yokes; capstan pawls; airport hinges

- daily greasing of the town pump and oiling its parts

- painting the stepladder stone

- penetrolling the stepladder rungs

- painting a coat of buff on both starboard davits

- painting propane tanks E and F tropical blue

- painting first coat of white in the headrig wire seizings

- a coat of stone on the sponge hotel bolts

- painting the folding chairs white

- spot sanding and penetrolling the unpainted jibboom wood

I had been trying to make a sea foam green color for one of the oxyfuel bottle jobs, and for the past few days I was trying to rehabilitate the one can of mistint green that seemed to have potential of the three I found. The cans were obviously quite old and forgotten, and probably had been frozen once because the paint was absolute foam and skin shit in the two cans and the third had actually rusted its bottom off, so that the bottom was just metal fragments bound together in dried paint. Interestingly, the paint never leaked through, so the fragments looked like they were just glued to a dry paint blob. The one can I spent days shaking, leaving upside down, etc etc and tried to use it today when it actually looked like paint. I poured some, and when I mixed it with thinner, I saw that it was still not paint at all. It was like a lava lamp waxy substance. Oh well. Worked until noon, and left only a few things out for the 12-4s to clean after the finished the last fifteen minutes of work. Lunch, then watched the Brothers Bloom and then Run Fatboy Run (the other day Shawn let me access his digital movie collection, something I've not been big on during the voyage since I have so many books to read, but I've been reading a lot anyway, so why not?). Got into a great conversation with Astrid and Odrun about languages, and the New Years ball, and life back ashore. Dinner, then read more World According to Garp for a while. Bracken found me later in the evening and told me I should read the final chapter of the “Handbook of Seaman's Ropework” by Sam Svenson, which is an excellent guide to ship maintenance and the treatment of metal and wood and the paints, oils, and tools, etc, that you should use and mix and which works best and which works worst for different jobs and the like. It is far better material than the paint guides I've been reading so far, which are just really basic product guides from International and talk only of their own products and their uses on high-end yacht-type boats. There are things to learn from them, for sure, but not like real shipwork things. So I read that and took down two full pages of notes. Then continued reading until 2300. Tonight we retard the clocks to ZD-4.