Back in Cartagena, Jan. 2011

After a long two days of travel from Vancouver, complete with an overnight stopover in Winnipeg and another in Bogota, we finally arrived in Cartagena on January 5th. Considering we went from -30 Celsius, to +30, we fared pretty well. All was fine aboard, not much mildew and no critters. We were lucky enough to find the small apartment vacant, in the boatyard, so moved in the day we arrived. We took most of the junk from our 4 large duffels and loaded them aboard Fortuitous. No one can ever say we travel light!


The photos here were taken in our...'I can't believe we paid that' $80 a nite hotel room in Bogota. I chose it, on Expedia, because it was reasonably close to the airport and, supposedly, had a shuttle. Neither was true! No shuttle at the airport and, upon asking in the morning, none was to be had.
We had one see-thru towel and it was an imposition for the maid to get us another. A bed that was like no mattress at all and pillows like rocks, well maybe slate rocks! It wasn't particularly clean, either. This was a 2 star for Expedia; needless to say, I've written my review for them!

Ya gotta love the lamp, though! The drawers in the bottom of the mirror had no bottoms...only for show.

Here is your typical Colombian taxi out front of our lovely hotel. We're waiting for another because we can't find one big enough for all our junk. We did get dry toast, eggs, and coffee, though! Of course, that can be had anywhere in Colombia for less that $2.50. Off to Cartagena!

This is the view of the flowers from our screened over (thankfully) porthole in the bathroom of our little boatyard room. When we were here, last year, these weren't screened. Someone must have been tired of the mosquitos.

Across from the boatyard is the naval school. They have some lovely boats, there, probably confiscated from the drug runners. They use these to train the cadets.

This is a view from the balcony outside the cruiser lounge. We are looking over the yard toward the naval school.
This is the view of the yard and Fortuitous waiting patiently for us. They have started to cover her, again, with plastic, to protect from overspray. As I write this, it is now January 28th and we still don't have our heads above water. We knew we had lots to do but, when we wrote out our list, many things didn't make it on the list, but still needed to be done.

Flavit's crew started working a couple of days before we arrived, washing and polishing Fortuitous. We were lucky enough to get Tuti back to complete some carpentry jobs aboard. He has been working with us for the past 3 weeks and has just finished up. He's a master and we are so pleased with his work. You'll see in the photos below.

We knew there would be issues with the gelcoat colour topsides. When they had painted our propane box last year, it was much yellower a colour than the rest of the topsides. It seems that maybe the gelcoat paint hadn't been mixed properly, most of the time, and the cream colour had settled out. Flavit thought he could repaint and match the colour, but after 2 tries we've given up. Today, he is going to re-gelcoat the enitre topsides , save under the toe rail and the top of the main cabin. We've reserved our decision on these until we see how close the colour match is. If we can't see much difference, we won't require him to do it. This has been a real pain because we just want them finished so we can do some of the outside work too.

That being said, we've both had plenty to do inside. I've been cleaning, organizing, and varnishing, while Ralph has been installing, cleaning up and painting the motor, and generally destroying any kind of organizing and cleaning that I've been trying to do...ah, boat-life on the hard!

Ralph found a few blisters on our rudder, so they have been ground out and repaired.

For those of you who think we are sitting/lying in our hammocks sipping margaritas, here are a few photos of what the inside of Fortuitous is like right now. We have been working 10 hours a day, every day, since we arrived...still not much sign of improvement!

We are working around all the mess as there's never anywhere else to work! You just keep moving the "workshop" from one end of the boat to the other. In the shot above, you can see our new seat boxes. They aren't quite finished, here, as we also added trim to the bottom and have since varnished them.




This is the V-berth right now. Those are the new cushions for the salon and the mattresses from the aft cabin.
And, this is the salon, where we have all our meals.
Looks cozy, doesn't it? Besides the kitchen, it is also a workshop. Here we're putting new plexi in the salon hatches.
This was a nasty job as we'd used 5200 sealant on the first try last season, and it hadn't bonded to the plexi. We had leaks, so we had to redo them. However, it bonded only too well to the metal. Trying to remove it from the metal was a terrible job and left a real mess. We had to re-paint the hatches.
Doesn't look quite like everyone elses' kitchen, does it?
Those of you who know me well must wonder how I'm managing to live/work around this kind of mess. Thankfully, we have a room in the boatyard. I truly couldn't live aboard during this kind of work.
Here I am trying to varnish the aft cabin bookshelves. Nothing is easy as all the nooks and crannies are hard to reach and get to...especially when you have all the junk we have aboard.
Ralph had purchased a couple of new thru-hulls and installed them for the cockpit drains. The old ones were plastic and very clogged from years of use and all the construction.
Before we left last year, we'd found dry rot in the aft cabin corner of our berth.
We weren't sure how bad it would be, but soon found out.
Thankfully, Tuti was around and we gave him the job of tearing it apart and fixing it up. This was a big job because all the vinyl had to be removed, from the stern, and a lot of wood had to be replaced and fibre-glassed in.
We had bought a new stove in Panama...a great deal at $650. These cost about $1800, if you can imagine that!! It's a bit smaller than our last one, so Tuti had to build it in.

He also had to finish the trim on the salon hatches. What a terrific job!


Here is the stern berth with all the wood removed so that Tuti can start to rebuild the berth and wall under the bookshelf.


This is what the new salon hatches look like now that they're varnished! What a class act! The plastic is in the hatches as this was taken just before our rebedding job.

It is amazing what he can do with his few hand tools. He's truly a master craftsman.

Last season we had purchased a big ugly rubbermaid box to put on the the aft cabin. This was needed as we didn't have enough storage space aboard with the 5 people we had to go through the canal. In truth, it was actually mostly full of BEER for the guys. Because we used it so much, we decided to have Flavit build us a smaller version to put on the supports we already have. This is it before it's gelcoated.

Another project for Flavit, while we were away, was to build us a new lid (the inside portion only) for our fridge. My brother Rob had built the original and it had served us well. But, now we had a professional fibreglass worker, why not take advantage of him.

It now looks like a factory-made product!

So, that shows you what we've been up to so far, and so far so good!