And On The 7th Week, They Did Work

Cruising life is not all fun and games. The long lazy afternoons, snorkeling trips, and sunsets must be paid for. We were able to take Leap out for 3 months thanks in large part to The Parents and their ability to cover our basic home expenses while we galavanted about. Without The Gloriamaris job, our Sabbatical would not have been possible, and The Gloriamaris needed work. 

At long last, it was time to remove the carpet. According to various apocryphal stories, many memories and food particles were embedded deep within the dark blue shaded and stained carpet that covered every floor surface in the Gloriamaris. It was an institution, a relic of decades which had accompanied the family on trips beyond count. And it was time for it to go. Because it's carpet. On a boat.

Our dedicated readers may remember the preposterously heavy roll of flooring from Leap's days as a cargo freighter. This roll, along with its smaller cousin, was to become the new and phenomenally more attractive floor throughout the boat. We chose the empty back rooms in the Roatan Yacht Club dock house as our staging area. Captain Dad and I summoned our strength, asked Zeppelin for help, and moved the hernia-inducing lump of awkwardness off the boat. It would return soon, but in precisely cut manageable pieces.

Over the next week, hatches would be precisely routed to shape, floors would be leveled, subfloor pieces would be replaced and shaped, and the main salon would receive a remarkable makeover. Leap maintained a stately presence in the anchorage while The Gloriamaris was a hive of activity at the yacht club dock. This was the best opportunity to have four people to manage the awkward pieces of flooring, and we were happy to do our part to speed the process along. Heather was coming in a week, and we wanted The Gloriamaris in a state to travel.

A slight aesthetic improvement

The Roatan Yacht Club had constructed a new cruisers' palapa during the previous week, and the beginning of the flooring project coincided perfectly with the grand opening of the new cruiser social scene. The community spirit is strong in the French Harbor anchorage, and we have more than a few fond memories of the old cruiser palapa on Fantasy Island. The best aspects of cruiser happy hour were now to be found at Roatan Yacht Club, and we gave daily progress reports on the project to the cruiser gatherings. 

The anchorage can often seem to be a kind of quasi-hermitage. Cruisers will necessarily spend much of their day alone working on boat projects. Many also live on an extremely tight budget, and so don't frequently partake in revelry or social excursions. For some, this is ideal. We frequently anchored 40 yards from people we never saw. Many boats seemed to house dedicated isolationists, Thoreau-esque recluses in the midst of a vibrant community. For others, the shipboard radio was in constant use, and no day passed without several dinghy social calls. 

In general, I found cruising to be a somewhat monastic lifestyle, an abstemious existence in very close quarters, complete with long periods of isolated reflection. Meditative tasks involve tinkering with dinghy outboards, while many hours are spent in contemplation of the origin of the slow drip in the v-berth. Community gatherings are frequent but brief, and often more intense as a result. A good cruiser palapa is at the heart of a good cruiser community, and all we lacked was anyone even close to our own age. 

I spent many hours in the palapa alone, reflecting on the trip and everything we had been through to that point. Many of the earlier posts on this blog were written during these reflective periods. I was there alone because I had no skill or experience with anything that was happening on board. Bryna, Captain Dad, and Admiral Mom were hard at work prepping subfloors and inspection port openings throughout the boat. I was useful mostly for unrolling and cutting large sections of flooring. It did, however, give me a chance to go from catastrophically far behind on the blog to only shamefully far behind. I count that as a win.

Next time: Harken Blocks for Dugout Canoes