It’s a Small World

It’s a Small World

Monday 19th April 2021

We had a really busy day. The divers from Coastal Diving arrived before 9am and cleaned the bottom of the boat. The zincs looked good and the “haloing” observed previously didn’t sound like it was any worse, but they did say that they noticed a lot of blisters on the paint whilst they were scraping. Having spent 28 days this past winter removing the old bottom paint and applying fresh barrier coat and anti-fouling I was far from delighted to hear this. My first thought was that I would need to re-strip the whole thing and do it again. On reflection I’m hoping that I may be able to tackle just the blistered areas. I have no idea what has gone wrong. I inspected a couple that I could see / feel near the water line and it appears that the first layer of anti-fouling (a hard bottom paint) has not adhered well to the barrier coat. Maybe I applied it too soon or too late … who knows. I’m pretty confident that this is not an osmosis issue, which would be more serious, but I won’t know the extent of the issue until we haul out in the late autumn. Needless to say this put a cloud over the rest of the day.

We still have the rental car until tomorrow so we did a major shopping trip and stocked up on food for the next 2 or 3 weeks and we also re-filled the propane on one of our tanks. Having squared away all the provisions it was time to turn our attention to the dinghy. We have a slow leak in one of the tubes and also need to re-fresh the anti-fouling paint. When we hauled the Dumb Dog up onto the dock and flipped it over we somewhat shocked to see how covered in barnacles the undersides were. I guess we left this job a little too long. We were able to scrape the bottom clean fairly easily and then started looking for the puncture. With the help of some soapy water we quickly identified where the leak was coming from and once the dinghy dried off we applied a patch and hopefully fixed it. The last job of the day was to paint some fresh anti-fouling paint on to the bottom of the dinghy. 

Whilst I was doing this I got chatting to another sailor from a 53 ft Island Packet docked nearby. He too had been down to the Dry Tortugas and when he said that his timing worked well because the ferry was out of service I said we must have been there at the same time. He asked me if I recalled the man being airlifted back to Key West after hurting his back and when I said  “yes” he replied “well that was me”! You may recall we wrote about this incident in our blog post on March 4th 2021 “The Dry Tortugas Adventures – Part 2 … “Things that cry ‘Help’ in the night”. 

http://ataleoftwochemists.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-dry-tortugas-adventures-part-2.html

What an incredible coincidence to bump into Gavin, the injured sailor behind this story. As we now understand it, Gavin had a pinched nerve in his back and when he stepped down off his boat onto his dinghy he stepped awkwardly, tore his hamstring and ended up in the water. He didn’t have his swim ladder down and could not climb back onto his boat, nor could he pull himself into his dinghy because of the back and hamstring issues. By the time we heard him calling for help and others arrived to provide assistance ha had been in the water for about 45 minutes. Once safely on land at Fort Jefferson the Park Service arranged for a helicopter to take him back to Key West, which arrived about 3 am. Gavin spent a few days recovering in Key West and then came back to Fort Jefferson once the ferry was back in service. He sailed back to Key West solo, but with other vessels keeping him company. It was great to meet up with him, see that he was well and hear the full story.

Mike

32 14.742 N, 80 44.856 W

Gavin on the dock at Skull Creek marina

Green Heron perched on a dock line at Skull Creek marina