Wednesday and Thursday

I didn’t write a blog yesterday.  Sorry about that.

Yesterday, Wednesday, Ian spent the whole day sanding the upper part of the hull.  A much more pleasant job than grinding tar, with a sanding machine attached to a monster vacuum cleaner – no dust at all – and he could stand on a mobile scaffold working at a comfortable height.  But after a couple of hours the sander with long vacuum hose attached still tends to get very heavy.  I must admit his biceps are getting very impressive. 

I rushed to the shops inbetween hail showers to buy some more shampoo.  Can’t believe how much we have gone through in a week!  After that I spent the rest of the day cleaning the deck.  Gee, was it dirty.  I used umpteen different products, many buckets of water, and a lot of elbow grease.  Where there had been any pressure (such as a footstep) on the tar dust it had really stuck to the paint.  The new paintwork that we did last summer on the coach roof came clean with a bit of work, but the old paintwork seems to have absorbed the tar colour. It looks awful and no amount of elbow grease will budge it.  Ian reckons we may just have to sand it seeing it has to be painted at some time anyway.

In the afternoon the temperature fell and the showers turned to squalls of hail and sleet.  Thank goodness we were in the heated shed.  There are large transparent panels in the roof and we could see the huge hail stones sliding down the roof then blowing all the back up to the top again.

The result of Ian’s labour:

Today, Thursday, I went in search on an optometrist so Ian can get new glasses.  He has been battling more and more and now often finds it better to do without them.  He saw an opthamologist in June last year and didn’t need new glasses at that stage but his eyes have changed a lot since then.  I found a place that does free eye tests so off he went this afternoon.  Not good news.  The cataract in his right eye has got worse and the lenses in his glasses now no longer do anything for his left eye.  She says he has to see an ophthalmologist, it will not do any good for her to sell him glasses that only suit one eye.  So we will wait till we get back home in June.  Poor Ian.

Apart from that he did a lot of sanding by hand around the windows, etc, that he could not do by machine.  I started cleaning inside, somehow that black shit even managed to find its way into the boat!  Ian has taken out the aft cabin windows that are set into the hull and I spent a couple of hours getting them cleaned up (lots of green grunge in the nooks and crannies).