Trautz' travel saga: YOLO back in Swelterville July 2017

I call this 'The Dame of Deltaville'. It is just a design the rainwater has created on a sheet of copper that had been tossed into the metal recycle trailer. The patina from the water sitting in a fold of copper created this image of what looks like a lady's face side-on. Mother Nature's art gallery here. It reminded me of 'The Face On The Ballroom Floor' in Central City, Colorado.

Another visually interesting thing I found in the boatyard was this old piece of wood that was laying in the weeds. The drops of resin stood out like drops of gold on the greyed wood. This image became my screen saver wallpaper.

I didn't spend all my time wandering around the junky boatyard. We did have a lot of work to do. We made new window coverings for the six surround windows in the boat. They let in a lot of light (and therefore heat) and we'd gotten used to having the sun blocked by the vinyl we'd added to the last set of mesh covers. You can see the one cover on and one off--YOLO is winking.

Chris and Jason are setting the lower edge on spiked snaps to know where the real snaps have to go. Chris runs a canvas sewing shop and let us use the sail loft floor to lay out and cut our new covers. Once the sewing was complete, he came to the boat and put the snaps on in place. A perfect fit.

Once the covers were on, we didn't want all that light so we covered the windows back up with a huge blue tarp. Everything inside took on a bluish tinge. Different, but much cooler.

Unfortunately, having the tarp on made us look like a garbage scow again. We had to weight the tarp down as the wind really cranks up when a rainstorm comes through.

Jason sitting outside the office using the internet after hours. Those bikes in the background were our evening rides.

We traced the old window coverings as a pattern to make the new ones.

I'm holding down one end so we could stretch it out to mark the lines with a pencil without the material sliding all over the smooth floor.

Jason cutting along the pencil lines.

We had to staple a thin line of facing material along the edge. I walked along the edge to keep the material from buckling and causing puckers while Jason stapled the layer in place.

Then we handed it off to Chris to sew. He was so fast! He's been doing this for 22 years and zipped through the sewing, adding the bolt rope as he went. Our sewing machine acted up and was not going to get this job done within our temper tolerance levels, so having Chris was a great relief. His advice and comments on the tactics helped the covers turn out awesome.

Jason struggling with our sewing machine to try to figure out why it was shredding the thread. The tension settings are always a chore to get right, but it turned out to be a burr on the hook and we'd never be able to get the job done with our machine.

Karen with a turkey feather in her cap inside the salon. We'd found the feather on a bike ride. We saw three wild turkeys cross our path one day. Deer, raccoons, snakes, and foxes also abound in this area of wooded fields.

We still had to deal with getting the hulls cleaned and waxed. We took off the old boot stripe and you can see how discolored the hulls were from the waters we'd sailed in.

We bought a new helm seat and Jason is augmenting the seams so it doesn't rip like our old one did. We have headlamps but he just used his mouth to hold the light on his work area.

Here the buffer guy is applying acid to the hulls to clean off the yellow. You can see the difference almost immediately. Just had to make sure we didn't breathe in those fumes and the hulls got a good rinse afterwards!

Jason supervising the buffing/waxing procedures.

A team of folks converged on the boat to do the waxing and buffing to get it all done in under 2 days. There is a lot of gelcoat to wax on YOLO.

Then Dan the boot stripe man came back to put our new stripes on. You can see how shiny the hull is.

The bow without the boot stripe.

The boot stripe being unveiled near the transom. OK, so he just peeled the paper off, but it looked so good. Just like new.

We went to the local farmer's market one Saturday and it just happened to be the end of a "family boat-building week". Kids and their parents built boats out of pre-cut lumber to a well-known pattern in 5 days. Then they launched them and rowed about in the creek basin here. This old boat is the F.D. Crockett, built in 1924. She is a shaped log deck boat (7 logs were shaped to form the hull) and is the only one of its kind that has survived the times. The other boats rotted away in the marshes around here.

This is another wooden boat built here and a replica of the one used by British soldiers to survey the Chesapeake Bay.

The families flocked to the dock to test out their newly-finished boats. I saw a bit of bailing going on, but none of them sunk. They rowed around and got to take their boats home. I imagine the wood will swell a bit in the water and stop some of the leaks.

The Deltaville Maritime Museum sponsored the family boat building event and the Crockett gave free rides in the river. Admission this day was free for all. The old museum burned down in 2012, so the number of items and displays was pretty meager.

A dolphin statue on the museum grounds. We do see dolphins this far up in the bay sometimes.

Another single dolphin statue.

This copper item in the museum didn't have a sign to tell me what it was, so it is still a mystery to me.

They had lots of old tools on display, though.

And old outboard engines.

This tiny old outboard doesn't look strong enough to move much of a boat.

The back end of the F.D. Crockett. The man just finished swabbing the deck.

While much of the Crockett has been restored, this is the original wheel.

Another statue of a crane on the grounds.

Jason eating cereal in the morning. A fresh start to another work day.

Then into the bunny suit for some painting of the hull.

The free dinghy another boater pointed us to. We got it all cleaned up but it still had a leak or two. We debated whether to recoat the pontoons with new rubberized paint, but held off on the idea.