It can't be tarps...

Spent a morning hoisting up a tarp over my work area just before I left for Errorzona. This is what it looked like.

Now it's lying on the ground, shredded along the edge where I had tied it with cordage. Tarps just won't do it. If I'm going to have shade, it will be more than a tarp. I'm thinking of beefing up the vertical 2x4s and adding cross members for wood or metal roofing.

There was a big blow here with rain, so now the boat needs pumping out... but not today.

We drove back last night and it seemed to take forever. There's road construction all the way up and back... they divert traffic from four lanes onto one each way and prohibit passing- for 300 miles! You can't go faster than the slowest vehicle in front of you... so the trip took seven hours instead of the usual four-and-a -half. I need a siesta.

I'll go out to the Flash tomorrow and restart the work. It'll be cooler, now that the monsoons are here.

I wanna go home...

Today is my second day in the US. We drove up yesterday from San Carlos in order to appear at the muni court in Sahuarita, Arizona over a ticket for expired license plates. In Arizona, if your auto insurance isn't renewed, they suspend your registration and hand out tickets. Then they tell you they want you to commit to a 3 year car insurance policy... all for a car that may spend a total of one month in Arizona over the 3 year period. Arrrg..
We got it sorted out when we showed up and paid a fine of $143, got the state of AZ to accept our Mexican car insurance as proof of financial responsibility, re-registered the car, jumped through several hoops, and groveled at the feet of Authority.
I want to reduce my trips to the US. I'm going to start planning the "Stuff in America Reduction Act."
The US is a nice place if you have to have everything really organized and you want your life structured and predictable, and it's OK to have everyone have a say in about how you conduct your life... then the US is a good place to be. But I wanna' go home to Mexico.
I think I would like to go to Turkey some day. I read the Ferroever blog and I've met other people who loved Turkey. Folks who have done circumnavigations in small yachts.
Sounds like a cool place. I might make it if I don't get too many more tickets in the US.

My mother needed a boat

Boats make me do things I normally wouldn't do. Pick up after myself, clean my room, put my stuff away, say my prayers... If my mother had a boat, she could send me there... with or without dinner. I would shape up in a hurry, no doubt.
I spent the day (from 7am 'til 11 am) and (4 pm to 7 pm) putting up shadecloth and cleaning the Flash. I found that tripping over my tools, and trash, and broken pieces of fiberglass was no fun. Besides, I'm looking for tanks and I can't find them if they're under 100 tons of garbage. I found a big water tank under a sheet of plywood. How do I know it was a water tank? The big black hose that runs from the deck fill to the tank has printed on it "big black water hose" or something like that... so tomorrow, I'm going to take the gasoline powered high pressure washer I have out to the boat and blast away all the grime and dirt and soot from the fire(s). Then I'll take some more pictures and see if they look any different from these.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I just turned 63 and I thought I should start working on the boat now. It'll be easier to remember how much time I actually put in on this thing if I just start now.
So, I was out at the ranch at 6:45 am, fired up the generator and started cutting fiberglass with my trusty sawzall. I was able to remove the old double cooler box/freezer, cut it in half and hoist it over the side. I cut out the bottom of the cockpit and am trying to figure out how to get it off the boat without giving myself a hernia. Me, the yard and the boat are covered with bits and pieces of fiberglass and at 10 am, I call it quits. Load up some of the trash in the pickup and drive back to the house. It was 85 degrees when I started this morning and it's time to get into the shade and cool off. But now that I'm removing the crappy stuff from the boat, it's opening up and everything looks just a little more possible. Like the story goes, I know there's a pony in there somewhere! For the next few days I'll be tearing out all the rotted and unwanted stuff. I sure am glad I'm doing this in Mexico... and I find that I LOVE this kind of project. The boat was designed to be big and fast. I'm going to use modern materials and techniques to make it faster, lighter, roomier and more agile. Also more ecological and self sufficient. It's great fun and a huge challenge.

How to make a painting

Recently, I mentioned to my First Mate that I was now blogging. In HER blog, (http://blissbloggin.blogspot.com) she started to brag about my "many talents" and I thought, "Gee. Why not share a little about the other side of my life... the side not directly related to boat reconstruction?" So, I offer here a little diversion:

One day we went walking through the park in downtown Guaymas and I started taking photos. Once downloaded to my computer I started pawing through the images for A STORY. Paintings can be hard work, time consuming, frustrating! Don't waste your time making something that just matches the curtains or the new sofa. Tell a story. And in one of my 8 or 10 photos, I found a Mexican Car Wash... look carefully at the center of the above photo.

I printed out a color version of the area I wanted to create and transferred the image to a canvasboard. The first step is to use a wash of thinner and oil paints to establish shadows, large areas of color, skin tints... the works. I often find that as I progress through the painting, some of these washed-in areas are perfect the way they are... I just leave them alone.

Then I start mixing paint and dabbing in the regions I want to define: the characters in my story... This is when I may experiment with changing the colors of clothing, cars, whatever... that needs to be either brought in the foreground or pushed back because it doesn't add to the story. In this case, I didn't change much. I did, however,  make the car a brighter red to create a focal point in the center of the composition.

In the version above I thought that maybe the iron lampposts would look good as wrought iron black, but as you can see, they seemed a bit overpowering and I moved back to white... something you can do in oils. In watercolors, you're stuck with what you put down first most of the time.

Here also, you can see that I am working in a triadic primary palette. The blue, yellow and red dominate the color space and really bring the scene to life... 

The strong shadows in the background emphasize the brightness of the day, the warmth of the climate, the clarity and quality of the light in Mexico.

A few more hours of detail work and the "Mexican Car Wash" will be ready for framing and a place on my wall.

Getting way out there.

This is what we call the Flying Saucer Version.

Looks different, huh? Is it feasible?

Hey! It's PLASTIC! Anything is feasible!

One year later...

Yesterday was the anniversary of the first time I saw the GF and stepped aboard. I had purchased the vessel from photos I had been emailed by the last owner... hmmm, perhaps I should tell the story?

For the last couple of years, I had been perusing the internet for a larger boat. But the interior designs/photos I had seen were tight, crowded and dark. It occured to me that if I could design my own interior, I could have a boat that serves my needs and not the needs of some strange sailor/owner profile... so I started looking into damaged boats, hurricane vessels, and the like.

As I continued the process, I started getting an idea of the ideal hull for a project boat: I wanted it to be already gutted out to save me the work; I wanted a boat over 40 feet in length; I wanted a modern, fast, efficient hull shape that could give me a good turn of speed and sail upwind well; it had to be cheap; and it had to include all the standing rigging in good shape; I didn't care whether it had a motor or not, I would probably repower anyway; and I wanted a center cockpit with a nice large aft cabin.

My reasoning was that I might not be able to purchase a 40 foot boat outright, but I could pay for the materials over time as I needed them, and labor rates in Mexico are a fraction of stateside prices.

Last fall, I noticed a posting on the Morgan Owners discussion board about a project boat going up for sale. (I also own the Morgan 33 Out Island, Bliss). The vessel was located in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The owner had been struggling with physical problems (a torn rotator cuff) and hadn't been able to do much with the boat. Then, his wife reached retirement age and was quitting her job, his house sold, and now he had the cash to go out and buy the cruising boat he wanted to sail off into the sunset with his wife. He could sell the project cheap and get out from under the storage costs.

Russ and Shelley Terry sent me the pictures of the boat, along with construction estimates, and lists of included gear. It matched my list above to a "T". Actually, it was even better... it was a Morgan! And I knew Morgans, and about Morgans, and all the people who owned Morgans.

Time for the morning cruisers net on channel 72 in San Carlos, Mexico. I'll continue later...