Got the boat up on the hard yesterday (still left plenty of time for wahooing, prancing and dancing around, however) and waited for the tide to recede. Two sets of visitors came in the meantime. Tea early in the morning. Beer later before we quit for the day.
Pulled the pressure washer down the hill and set it up. But, as the final inches of tide drained away, the grid broke and the boat settled down into the mud instead. We have a little tide grid that elevated the boat a couple of feet and it, having been there for a long time, simply broke and so the boat was now ON the beach instead of ‘up and elevated’. So we were ankle-deep in mud – but still grinning – and we set to work.
OH MY GAWD!
Pressure washers push water out of small nozzles at up to 3000 psi and this one was on the top of it’s game. Powerful. You could literally tear away skin if you put it too close to your arm. But we had the wand right up against clumps of barnacles that had managed to find holdfasts on an anti-fouling painted bottom and they simply would not let go with all that pressure trained right on them. Admittedly, our angle was not good since the boat was sitting in the mud but, with a big lever, I could get the boat tilted over far enough to see the bottom. The trouble was that the bottom-bottom is sea-mud and we were squirting 3000 pounds of water pressure at it in a confined space. Barnacles are hard to see in a cloud of mud.
We worked hard, got all the barnacles off and finally had a clean hull. The two of us? Not so much. Another small step for man, a giant mudbath for woman.
I don’t usually add pictures but yesterday deserved them. Sal was a walking slime ball and I was likely even dirtier. We had literally covered ourselves in lagoon-goo. What an incredible mess!
Which is fine if you get the job done but the lack of elevation from the lack of grid meant that the boat could not be painted. We’ll have to re-do this effort after rebuilding the grid. So yesterday was a not-so-dry run, so to speak.
Next job: rebuild grid. Then re-do spraying. Then paint the bottom. Ten, maybe a dozen social visits to keep the pace of work to a crawl. ETA: next Spring.
Our Off the Grid Home 
I like this. There can be a very subtle grey between truth and lie. Hard to see the line sometimes.
Congratulations on the book!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Referring to the blog two posts ago? Or do you doubt that cleaning the bottom of the boat in the lagoon can get muddy?
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People pay big money to have a mud bath! Slime maybe not so much……
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Yeah. I know. But we were in with more of the slime and sea-weed bits, clam shells, sea worms and barnacle/mussel juice than real nice, clean mud. Plus, Ol’ Sal likes to really ‘get in there’ and so she came out really creature-of-the-lagoon-ish. I can’t bend that easily so I just lie in the mud so I am half creature, half cute guy. (OK, 90% craeture, 10% muddy guy)
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You have written about shoreline slime before and wrestling objects on the beach. Were you two not hypothermic after this mud fest.
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Nah. We were muckin’ about for a couple of hours, maybe four….it was sunny (In April! Climate change is REAL), the lagoon is out of the breeze and I actually got sun burnt on my face. It’s a horrible job but, if it gets too horrible, we just don’t do it. We sit and read instead. Or something. It’s mucky but it ain’t hell. In fact, compared to driving from Vancouver to Langley in rush hour on a Friday, it’s preferable.
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How many shades of grey…!
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One big advantage of having our boat in fresh water, only a bit of algae to brush off during a swim in the summer. We pull our ocean boat out for winter storage so we can get to the bottom for cleaning and painting. Even so, Wayne came home with black splotches all over himself. We went out to eat afterwards even though he looked like he lost a paintball war. – Margy
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I know…everytime I start to worry about ‘sea life’ and the planet, I just have to look at the bottom of our boats. Life is teeming there.
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