(no subject)

[scrottie]

I'm not used to being pounded in the face with waves, but the water feels amazing. Trying to re-acclimate. I remember having some rhythm there but maybe it was more tenuous than I remember and the current level of tenuoius is the norm. Learned about swim bouys somehow and I don't remember how quite by chance last year, got a couple, then started seeing them everywhere. In the Lake Moreau Lake State Park https://parks.ny.gov/parks/moreaulake/details.aspx where it sure seemed like swimmers had gone to escape the pandemic, several people had them including a swimmer couple, which was cute. The lake is just the right size that you can swim from one end, take a little breather, and swim back again, and it feels like a good workout. Ocean swimming, lake, swimming, and chlorine swimming are each very different. Chlorine swimming, I feel safe enough that I can push cardio and oxygen in to the red and keep it there a while, but then I have to deal with the leaving the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone routine or suffer chloradation poisoning. But lakes in summer have brain eating amoeba so there's that. So, swim buoys are little vinyl blobs that hook around your waist with nylon straps and nylon buckles and if you do suck in two lungs full of water, you can hug and cry as long as you need to, and they come in cheerful colors. I got hot pink to match my swimcap because I'll drown if my long hair gets in my face. So now I'm two hot pink blobs in the water as observed from a distance. Brannan Island State Recreation Area in their quest to keep people from sneaking in from the backside to swim and fish and whatever else for free has no erected a fence in addition to the big dirt mounts, signs, and logs. This and the windsurfing holy spot right by in Sherman Island County Park both got shuffled over to private administration through a conglomerate that just runs parks and like a paid parking lot, not much happens except making sure fares are collected. Sneaking in the back way and locking up my bike in the mosquito invested weeds down by the Threemile Slough and doing laps between the banks had been my thing but haven't quite gotten back to that because the park sure looks like it's still closed and I've been too busy to find out and never got a pass. The opposite side of the bank is private ranch with plasma cut rusty steel signage and everything. Jumping in from the banks of the San Joaquin, cars will occasionally stop and watch from the ring road. Up until about 100 years ago, what I'm doing is way more normal. This is a bit different than the routine I'd eventually settled on which is way cooler.

Still finding holes in the bottom of the bilge. Water is finding its way up from the rudder shoe bolts (because it drained out of there long enough that it grew algae when I was hauled out) and up from around the stern tube so we're well past the point we have to assume that any empty spaces in the hull of the boat are full of water, so this seems now precarious. Maybe it wasn't before the stern tube was bashed in so hard by people trying to change the cutlass bearings that the fiberglass around it spiderweb cracked but it is now. I've found about a dozen of these screwholes straight through the fiberglass to the lead keel now. People are fucking idiots. So many questions... if you're going to screw the bilge float and pumps down, why not at least re-use holes instead of making more every time? It seems like kindergarten level boat ownership that you don't screw screws through bottom of the hull of the boat and some dumbfuck or army of dumbfucks did it a dozen times. Cleaning the last round of slightly oily grime out of the bilge this time with a brush drill attachment turned up those four I'd missed previously despite efforts to find and patch all of them. Mind you, when I got this boat (I'd like to talk to the people smarter than me) there was cracking in the centerboard trunk probably created when bronze caps were torqued off the ends of the bronze pipe holding the centerboard pivot pin and water was seeping in. One of the goals for the today between hoping over to Rio Vista to sign tax preparer authorizations was cleaning up the fiberglass at the rear engine mounts, which amounts to some kind of hard wood fiberglassed in with the fiberglass mostly long since pulling loose, but didn't quite make it that far. Did some grinding on the fiberglass around that before getting distracted with the extremely lumpy and full of this incredibly thick sandpaper clogging paint that levels out the extremely uneven fiberglass on the bilge floor and did likewise all around the stern tube. I hate this paint so much. It does nothing except make repairs confusing and difficult. So, next go, securing the wood pieces the engine is mounted to after removing more paint and wiping it clean. Then re-enforcing bulkheads because nothing is adequate and given everything keeps pulling free and breaking, I'm amazed at how this boat made it this far. This boat has a good reputation for a solid, well-made boat, which is why I bought her, but from what I've seen of the club and other people's Pearsons, they were not screwing around. When Jesus comes back and all land is under water, he'll be greated by sailors in Pearsons. The shroud knees are a mass of fiberglass that just makes ya go, yeah, that's not going anywhere, instead of some tabbed in bulkhead. My gallon set of West System epoxy cans are running low and that's the second set so time to go buy the third gallon of epoxy.