A summary of our July adventures, including flooding, cleaning decals off the hull, taking down our sails, pulling up our dinghy, and Korean sunscreen!

After spending the first week of July in Michigan visiting friends and family, the rest of the month was much quieter. Definitely slower than June, which was absolutely insane.

We had a farewell dinner for some friends of ours who are moving to Seattle. In order to leave the marina we had to wade through the parking lot, because we were at the height of a king tide. Boat life at its finest.

The king tide, combined with huge amounts of rain, flooded us in to the marina. We left for work one Friday, me in the car and Kyle a couple minutes later in the bus. The road to the marina had flooded deep enough that I didn’t want to take the car through it. I’m sure I could have made it, but there’s no point in driving through salt water if you don’t have to. I waited a couple hours, the water receded, and then I drove in to work.

We got some boat projects done, first of all we scraped off the awful decals on the boat. At first glance they looked fine, but when you look closely, you can see that this job was barely half-assed. So ugly. So we got rid of those, along with the paw prints on the bows.

Here is the process we’re using for sticker removal: first, pull off the stickers, using a razor blade as needed. Then, use Goof Off to remove any adhesive residue. This also strips the gelcoat, so in order to protect the gelcoat, we waxed the entire area.

Afterwards: a nice, clean, sleek-looking boat. We prefer a more minimalist style anyway.

We removed the mainsail. That was a bit complicated with all the reefing lines, I’m hoping we don’t screw up too badly when reinstalling it. Our main has 6 battens, plus two more in the sail cover. The sail is huge, and the longest batten is nearly the length of our boat, so it was quite a feat to wrestle that whole thing on deck, then flake it and fold it up.It is too heavy for me to comfortably lift alone, and it didn’t fit into a dock cart, although we were able to lay it on top and haul it out to the car.

The following weekend we woke up to a dead calm, which was perfect, because we needed to fully unfurl the genoa in order to remove it. Any wind catching the sail would have put stress on our docklines and made sail removal more difficult. Fortunately this one came down much faster than the main, and doesn’t weigh nearly as much either.

Then we dug the spinnaker out of the forward berth and somehow packed all three sails into my little Honda Fit. Fitty was riding pretty low after that. We have to bring them in to a sail loft, we’re almost certain that we’ll have to replace the main, and probably the genoa. This is the biggest expense we expect to face in our refit.I ordered a bunch of Korean sunscreens and they arrived mid-month, it took them about six weeks to get here. I need to write a whole post on sunscreen, as a pale, sun-loving liveaboard sun protection is extremely important to me. This sunscreen is technically a face sunscreen, but the price is low enough that I’ve been using it as a non-waterproof body sunscreen. It feels like a light lotion, it is so wearable. The Asian sunscreen market has top-notch skinfeel.

We pulled the dinghy up on deck for the first time. It didn’t go terribly, but we definitely need more practice at that. Kyle cleaned it and added 303 aerospace protectant to the dinghy to prevent sun damage, although ideally we’ll add chaps or a dinghy cover later.

It seems like we packed all our fun this month into the first week, then spent the rest of the month getting projects done. Definitely a good month.