Tuesday the 5th of April 2007
Hi everyone,
We are having dinner with old cruiser friends
It's already April and Elvina is still on land. We remain on shore and are living in a house. The climate has treated us better than anticipated; the winter has been warmer than normal. We have still been freezing though. It's been somewhat special for us to live in a house again. It's so much bigger than Elvina. We are in fact happiest being in the same room where we can see each other even if we do different things.
Gunilla and her friend Pija in a Swedish snowfall
We spent 6 weeks in Sweden in December and January and it was fun. We got to see most of our friends but the schedule was quite hectic. It felt a bit strange being home and away at the same time. A little like being a guest in reality, we have changed our view in life and understand even more what a privileged life we are living. It was nice to get back to our normal life and to live anonymously again. The walking street in Kristinehamn (the town we used to live in) was avoided towards the end since we got stared and pointed at.
Elvina's keel, work in progress
Life goes on and we have plenty of things to do on the boat. Kris has taken out most of the fittings and is sanding and varnishing them in the basement of the house. Gunilla has several sewing projects, a new sailcover is finished and new curtains made.
Elvina's keel has been sanded and all GRP outside the iron part of the keel is gone. We found the old trimrudder inside the GRP. It took Gunilla 3 days with the angle grinder to cut it off. Water came pouring out from a space in front of the trimrudder. We are glad we found out now while we still have a fair chance of redoing it properly. Especially since we are taking the time to work on the hull extensively due to the osmosis we had.
We will build a new holding tank in epoxy. The old one (from 2001) corroded so we do not want a new one in stainless. We will move the batteries and build two smaller watertanks instead of the bigger one we had in that same space. Kris has been checking where to buy all the things we need from our lists. There is money to save, e.g a gallon of epoxy is $30 cheaper in one place and we are going to use quite a lot of it. We can start with the interior epoxy projects but the hull will have to wait until the temperature gets up higher.
Kris onboard Lucy, a friends boat
If you want to know when we are launching we will answer when the boat is done. No date to aim for, we would rather take our time now and know the work gets done in a proper way. We don't know when we get another opportunity like this and it can't get much better than this. So far we have been pretty lonely at the yard but we expect the other boat owners to show up soon when it gets warmer.
We have looked around in our neighborhood too. A few trips to Boston, another one to New Hampshire to visit some cruiser friends. We also had a look at the Joshua Slocum Monument which is close to us. It's fun to extend the views!
We wish you a good spring
Gunilla och Kris