A very auspicious day – Pete’s birthday…he is a bit horrified.  How could he possibly be 65??  Not long ago, if he heard somebody had died at this age, he would have said, “Oh well, they had a good innings, didn’t they?”  And now, here he is, feeling very much in the first, or maybe second, flush of youth…and 65…nowhere near ready to cash in his chips and say, “Oh well I had a good innings.”

And auspicious for me – my second day of NOTworking… yesterday my old workfriend Kerrie came to visit, on her way to an appointment.  She arrived at 9am and we sat and drank coffee very happily on the couch for an hour – oh the luxury of not being in the office from 9-5…She retired over a year ago so it isn’t such a novelty to her, but for me it was quite extraordinary!

We got up early and set off to anti-foul 2XS, jauntily perched up UP on the Domain slip.  On the way we called in to see Martin, Pete’s son, busily working on the South Hobart renovation project.  He looked at me quizzically – “Is that what you’re wearing, to paint the boat?  Ummm…no.  take these!”  He handed me his brother James’s sturdy blue work overalls so I didn’t have to work wearing lemon yellow faux merino…

The boat looks huge up on the slip.  A great area of underbelly exposed to the world.  We got out our rollers and pans and had the whole thing covered with cobalt blue antifoul paint within about four hours.  It was an absolutely beautiful day, neither hot nor cold, brilliantly sunny, and it was really very pleasant work.  The Windeward Bound (sailtraining tall ship) was on the slip next to us, looking absolutely enormous out of the water.  The volunteer crew were certainly having a much harder job cleaning this boat than we were with 2XS.  They had to have scaffold put up, and were noisily scraping horrid rusty bits off with small spatulas.  I think Pete had the hard part of the job yesterday, cleaning all the grey grunge off.  We had company on 2XS – a lovely young marine electrician, Ben, who scampered knowledgeably up and down the big metal ladder to get on and off the boat with various mysterious tools.  We also had two lots of visitors, who had been driving across the bridge and had seen us down below.  Aha!  WHAT is going on?  Very nice to see Richard M with Larry and Bart, and then Richard D, but we couldn’t stop and talk at all because the paint starts going all hard if you don’t keep using it as fast as possible.

Eventually it was all as blue as could be.  Pete was still finding little bits to patch up, but I had finished all of my pots and scrapings so it was time to – oh no – examine my very blue, rapidly drying hands.  Time to wash off all of this paint.  Ofcourse you can already foresee what happens when you try to wash off antifoul boat paint with water…nothing!  It is totally impervious to water, as it should be.  I walked around whimpering faintly to myself – I very strongly disliked having dry blue painty hands.  Maybe the crew on the Windeward Boudn would have some useful product for dissolving all of this increasingly yucky blueness.  The scaffold builder was very friendly, and very sympathetic to my plight, and he asked some of the volunteers if they could help.  They were all very beautiful young people, backpackers from Sweden and the like.  One of them strolled up to me with a handful of product…delicately scented apricot scrub from the Body Shop.  This made my hands just as blue but sweeter smelling.  Ben the electrician gave me some acetone- yes ofcourse what I needed was POISON - and this smeared the blue into a different sort of all-encompassing paste.  Eventually Pete finished his patching and painting and we went and found a big bottle of turpentine, which did the trick, more or less.  We still have bright blue cuticles and knuckles… - lovely for our dinner at Shippies…

Tomorrow we do a second coat; I think I will buy some latex gloves….