Our first day being hauled out is usually a pretty frustrating one. With a huge list of jobs in each of our heads, Maryanne and I are always eager to make the most of the time and get things started. Since she and I are not doing any of the actual work of operating the haulout machinery, it feels like we are relegated to not being able to do much other than pace back and forth in the sun and slowly walk behind Begonia as she is moved to her spot on the pad, while trying our best not to appear to be looming. Add in lunchtime and breaks for the staff and soon the end of the day is nearing and we have barely pulled out any tools yet. Sitting down to dinner, we're still basically on the same boat, which we both agree is overdue for this particular haulout, with our only evidence of progress being the view of the adjacent boats filling the windows. It seems lees like scenery than a grim reminder of what's to come.
It starts with actually getting removed from the water, pressure washed before being moved and safely blocked in our new home location
Day Two and beyond was different. My plan from here on in was to wake up in the dark. That way, coffee, breakfast, and a brief conference about the day's impending work could all be completed by the time it started getting light enough out to see what we were doing.
As usual, Maryanne served as our Project Manager, while I would occasionally add input about one thing or another, and then go about doing the next job that needed doing on my end while she set to doing hers. At the end of each day, I was pretty adamant about tidying up enough for us to at least be able to find the now widely-scattered tools the next morning, and to have a few minutes of normal civility over dinner before another too-short night of sleep. Then we would repeat of the same pattern the next day. As I was going about my tasks, when I reasoned that I had just enough energy in me for the above, I would opt to do "just one more thing" before finally finding Maryanne and begging her do finish her one more thing before it gets too dark.
Maryanne, in her initial e-mails back and forth to the yard and the various contractors, estimated that we would need to be hauled out for about three weeks. That seemed to me to be a bit optimistic (I think she was secretly hoping to be back in the water before the holidays), but we still ended up being on the hard way longer than I had expected.
This particular haulout ended up being especially rough for us for a few reasons. Firstly, we had both finally decided to stop putting off so many of the non-structural, non-safety, cosmetic items that always seemed to never make it to the top of our list on previous haulouts beneath stuff that was clearly more important.
This made for more work in general this time, but it also made for a different type of work. Painting the bottom or replacing the rigging or even fixing an engine can always be done "over there". If it's the engine under our bed, we'll just switch berths for a few days until we can move back to our familiar space.
This time, however, in addition to all that normal stuff, we are also doing things like replacing the flooring, painting interior walls, and replacing the surface wood on our main bulkhead. This means there is no place left on the boat that is not a work site. Eating dinner off a drop cloth in a room that has been tented off with plastic sheeting to keep the dust down, it is hard to feel like the end of the tunnel was in sight.
It felt very much like we were living in a construction site for much of our time, with ceilings, flooring and even some walls removed or being worked upon
Then came the yard. As usual, Maryanne was very proactive in sending out e-mails to book all the work we currently needed help with as far in advance as possible. She would then send follow-ups and more follow ups to make sure the right workers would be available when we were there.
We have previously said many glowing things about Norsand, and I think most of that still applies. The problem this year seems to be the basic economic problem of too much demand for the supply. There were a lot of boats hauled out this year, and they were all hoping for the yard to do some or all the work for them. Mark, the yard manager from before, who we could not perturb, has now moved on. The new guy has a lot of experience and is a fount of useful information about how to do work outside our skill sets. He does, however, seem to not like saying no. He will say yes to everything anybody wants. That's how the yard makes its money, of course. The problem is that he will say yes to two thousand hours of work for a period when there is only enough staff to do eight hundred. This has the effect of making everyone unhappy as they wait for their turn for the laborers to begin (whist having to pay for many extra yard days), long after they had been told the work would be complete already.
It was the same for us. Despite having made an appointment long ago for our particular yard time, it was almost three weeks before we could finally get someone to come aboard and have a look at what we wanted from those bonus jobs. By then, Maryanne had originally been hoping to at least be getting ready to be going back in the water. We were given plenty of attention and promises that, since it was Friday, work would begin on Monday, maybe Tuesday...
All the while, Maryanne and I had been holding off on a lot of our own work until their work was done. Some things just have to be done in a specific order. You can't repair an item without the parts. You can't test a repair until it has been completed. You can't have somone working on a room while you remove the flooring, It's not a good idea to remove tank valves until the tank is empty, etc. We still had a lot to do, but we were running out of stuff we could do before the other work started.
Then Begonia made it to the top of the list. Suddenly, we had tradies stepping on each other's toes to get to their respective parts of our boat, while Maryanne and I did the same in ours.
After a few days of this, I couldn't help but notice unusual periods of quiet. That's when I realized Maryanne and I are not subject to the same labor laws. Thirteen-hour days with no lunch, no break, and not even enough time to use the bathroom would be patently illegal for the guys scraping off Begonia's bottom paint. On Friday afternoons when they all gathered up their stuff and started heading for the exit, I couldn't help but envy them a little (just a little). C'mon! There's still four hours of daylight left!
Of course, it also didn't help that nothing, absolutely nothing, went to plan. Every single job on our list had some complication or another come up that made it take way longer than it should have. Take the item, "Replace the Windlass" Our windlass is great, but it has one major design flaw: it is secured to the boat with stainless steel studs threaded into the aluminum body. Since they are dissimilar metals, this causes the body to eventually corrode away until the thing falls off. The consensus amongst the experts is that the design of the mounting gasket, which causes it to sit in a pool of salt water, isn't helping. Unfortunately, this particular make and model of windlass is one of the very few that will fit in Begonia's mounting space, so we have little choice but to replace it.
Or do we?
We did that the first time, back in 2018. Windlasses are expensive, like more than my first three cars, combined. This time we were told that they are a lot more now, particularly if shipped all the way to New Zealand. Groan.
Maryanne did some digging and found out that we could replace only the corroded body part AND we could actually get it to New Zealand in time, for less than half the cost. That means that the task was now to completely disassemble the windlass (think lots of gears and little springs that go zinging by your ear never to be seen again), change the part, and then reassemble the windlass. Oh, yeah, and then install the newly-repaired windlass.
One of the sub-jobs of the main task was: "Remove the four bolts holding the plate on to gain access to the innards of the windlass for further disassembly." I know for sure, because I am the original owner, that these bolts have not been touched since we installed the new (and used lashings of treatments designed to prevent corrosion).
Our windlass had failed (again) despite all sorts of treatments and regular fresh water rinsing. Replacing the corroded case required a full rebuild and a LOT of unexpected effort
They were really in there. I stripped all four bolt heads trying to remove them. This required them to be drilled out. We did have the right sized drill bit, but it was composed of metal barely harder than the bolts themselves. Getting the right one required a bike trip to the nearest tool store to buy a carbide bit. They were out of that size, so I had to keep riding to store after store until finding it on the far side of town. In this way, "remove four bolts" turned into an all-afternoon affair. After returning home, I ended up only having enough daylight to remove three of them. Thus, after a whole long, frustrating day, I had exactly zero items I could cross off our Jobs List. My average is going to have to be higher than that.
Everything we did, every single thing, had something like that go wrong that turned it into a huge ordeal. Every time one of us would try to knock out an easy item, just so we could say we got something done, the part wouldn't fit or a bolt would strip or we would end up spending an entire morning tearing apart the already-torn-apart boat, looking for the one lost tool that can do the job. When we couldn't find it, we would have no choice but to stop what we were doing and make a trip to the store to buy a replacement.
Then there were the tradies. They tended to inadvertently make things worse by saying things like, "Just get everything ready and I'll be over tomorrow morning to start the work". What we were now doing was cancelled because we didn't want to be the reason a particular job doesn't get started, especially when it could mean Begonia needs to do another slow climb from the bottom of Norsand's priority list again.
Our very worst day in the yard came when Trevor, the outside contractor who we hired to install the new flooring, told us to, "Remove the old flooring and clean the surface. I'll be by tomorrow to installing the floor in the main cabin.".
Maryanne and I had originally toyed with the idea of installing the new vinyl flooring ourselves. With a suggestion from Jeff (more on him later) we saught out an expert to help. After talking to a few professionals, including one company who wanted several thousand dollars to do the job for ten square meters of floor area, and they convinced us that the job is quite frankly beyond the ability of amateurs with normal tools. In hindsight, they were right. We would have TOTALLY screwed up the job if we had done it (especially the large patch of flooring in the main cabin, the one that everyone gets to see first!). We didn't like the estimates, though, so Maryanne started searching for more frugal options.
That's how we found Trevor, a retired vinyl installer with forty years of experience who picks up odd jobs to keep himself busy. (Installing flooring?) His estimate was under a thousand dollars (whew). We winced and agreed to let him do it.
Unfortunately, he was planning on leaving town to be with family over the holidays, so if we wanted him to do the job, our choice was pretty much: right now. We originally wanted to do this job closer to last in order to avoid too much time tracking yard grime all over our pristine new floor. Plan B became: Hide the new floor under drop cloths for a month or so until the yard work is done.
Which brings us back to, "Remove the old flooring." Based on some test removals at a few of the peeling corners and our steps, Maryanne and I had mistakenly thought the job wouldn't be too bad. When Trevor dropped this one on us, it was midday and we were both really busy with other things. We decided to rearrange our tasks to allow an hour or two at the end of the day for removing our old flooring.
Anyone who has ever dealt with the contact glue used to apply flooring knows what's coming next. The corners Maryanne and I peeled up had been exposed to decades worth of grime, spills, moisture and salt, which significantly weakened the glue's bond. The stuff in the middle was in a pristine, hermetically sealed environment. That glue was ridiculously, unnecessarily strong. Had we been able to get a good enough grip on the vinyl, we could have easily lifted the whole boat with it. We probably could have filled the boat with water and still lifted it. What the hell is that stuff?
Removing the old vinyl (from both wood and gelcoat bases) was easy on the small matches, but quite a bit tougher on the larger areas, and then there was the cleaning and prep before the new flooring could be laid
Fortunately for us, Trevor left behind his heat gun for us to use in case we needed it. Did we ever! Heat guns of this type are like super hair dryers that are half a step below a blow torch for putting out heat. Contact glue weakens with heat, so the idea is to heat the old flooring until you can barely stand to touch it, then grab a big (gloved) handful and start yanking while someone else goes at the edge with a sharp scraper.
Alternating duties and using every muscle to pull as hard as we could, we were able to pull up about a centimeter per exhausting try. Three hours in, we were both completely spent, we were only about halfway done, darkness was falling, and we knew Trevor would be here in... what is it? ...nine hours, to begin installing the replacement floor. We had no choice but to keep going. Afterward, we didn't even get relief from going to bed for a while because we were both too sore to sleep from muscle aches, bruises, and burns. Even though we later agreed that was our worst day, several others came close.
When Trevor finally finished the installation two days later, we both agreed it was beautiful. It has to be. We are NEVER doing that again! Then we covered it up to enjoy later in some distant, unseen future.
It was about then that the yard's guys started showing up in earnest. Of course they did. With the flooring in progress, the only way to get from one part of the boat to another was by climbing through the hatches. Three guys showed up to start the grueling work of stripping the antifouling back to bare gelcoat. Then Premek arrived to do fiberglass repair on damage hull caused by the starboard rudder blade when we hit a submerged tree in the ICW over a year ago.
Dislike is probably a bit too strong a phrase, but early on, we decided we didn't care for Premek.
Don't get me wrong. Premek is a very nice guy. He also has very high standards for his work and he will not be rushed. He also seems to prefer chatting to being encased in full protective gear grinding away or working with toxic chemicals. To be fair, his job requires a lot of waiting for resin to cure between coats, and you really don't want to rush that part, but still, the yard charges ninety bucks an hour for his time and it's really hard not to keep a little taxi meter running total going in our heads.
When he finished the job, as well as a couple of other minor ones, his work was so good that we literally can't find the repairs anymore. Okay, we'll give him that, but when his time with Begonia was over, I think we were all glad we wouldn't be seeing each other so much anymore.
When the yard told us their main woodworking guy wasn't available to replace our bulkhead panel, which was probably the most major job on our list, and that they were going to be sending Premek over on Monday, Maryanne and I looked at each other and both let out a collective groan. Not Premek...
When he showed up, he didn't help matters. I think he may have been a little annoyed at having just been reassigned back to us only a few minutes earlier for what looked like was going to be the foreseeable future. He took one look at the wall and then seemed distraught almost to the point of tears at how difficult the task before him was. He kept talking about how it was going to take him WEEKS at the least to do the work. This will cost THOUSANDS! The wall is not flat. The wall is not straight. We are going to have to start MAJOR modifications to make this work, etc.
Maryanne took Premek by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, "Premek, the wall was never flat. We don't want it to be flat. We don't NEED it to be flat. All we want to do is replace the bad surface wood with another piece so that it looks better than it does now."
Premek is a perfectionist, he went away to do some thinking...
While he was gone, two things seemed to have happened. The first was that he came up with a pretty good plan for the repair. This improved his mood considerably.
The second thing seemed to be a change in his take on us. Apparently, he deals with a lot of entitled yachties who want great work done and they want it done yesterday. Uh, yeah. I guess we may have been doing a little bit of that. Once he realized that our surname wasn't Moneybags, and that we didn't need perfect work, just the most economically feasible pretty good work, he could not have been more helpful.
This is when I realized that the value of Premek's hourly rate was not so much in his labor (which, again, is very good), but in his knowledge. To help save us some unnecessary cost, he taught us how to do everything but the hardest, fiddliest parts of his job. He would ask to see our tools, look at them, and then tell us why they weren't exactly the best ones to use for a task. Then he would come back after his shift with his own better tools, teach us how to use them, and then lend them to us for the night so we could have a good practice. Then he would say things like, "Remove that wall. I'll be back in the morning to start putting in the new one." Premek!!!!
It was always a huge compliment when, having assigned us some homework, he would return the next morning, declare it a "good job," and then carry on with the next step himself without surreptitiously 'fixing' our portion first.
The yard staff once told Maryanne that Premek had after working on the NZ team race boat for urgent repairs, was offered and turned down a job with Porche (the high end car company), saying he would rather work at Norsand because there is more variety and he likes helping people.
I don't doubt it. After dealing with him some more, I completely changed my mind about him and his rate. I suspect that if you lived down the street from him, Premek would happily spend the whole day fixing your house for no other payment then a cold drink at the end and the smile on your face. A guy like that really does deserve to be able to make a good living for his skills. Even though it would have cost us a little more, I think we would have both been happy to have the yard assign Premek to do everything on their portion of our list.
Unfortunately, we were not so lucky. As I said before, the yard was struggling to provide enough labor to meet the demands of all the boats that were hauled out at a given time. Because of this, everyone, including us, had pared down our lists of work requested from the yard to only the bare essentials, leaving the remainder to figure out ourselves.
[Maryanne]We worked long hours every day, and mostly cooked at home in the evenings too, it was exhausting. Thankfully there were a few distractions that Maryanne insisted on. Fistly was an OCC (Ocean Cruising Club) dinner for the arriving boats held at a local Indian restaurant, secondly the local marine industry put on a welcome event one evening, complete with a proper Maori welcome and full show of songs and traditional Maori dance.
Welcome distractions from the general mistery of hard-labor in the yard
The yard cats are a joy for us to fuss over, unfortunately Ben (who was a fixture aboard Begonia the previous time we'd hauled out here) was friendly until he wasn't any longer and managed to bite Kyle's hand (down to the bone), which soon showed a serious infection and required a visit to the local medical clinic and some serious antibiotics.
[Kyle]As various jobs progressed, it wasn't uncommon to have new, previously unknown things come up that would now have to be added to the list. Some were minor. Others were not. For the most part, we tried to avoid involving the yard to keep the problem from getting worse for everybody. The yard manager was always overtly willing to help, but it was hard not to notice the subtlest cringe when we apologized for adding something new, and relief when we told them to remove one of our items from their list.
One of the jobs we still wanted professional help with, but could not get any firm commitments from the yard to do, was to add some shelves in various parts of the boat. After years and years of never operating any of our cabin doors, we finally decided to remove them altogether. The problem was that we have been using the space behind them (they are generally secured in the open position against a wall) as a fairly crappy ad hoc storage to put things we can't find another home for. Maryanne got the idea that we could put shelves in those spaces. That would give us better organized storage and make the space easier to transit, since the shelving would encroach on the area less than the doors had previously. Also, our doors are heavy, high-quality wood. She was fairly confident the weight of each set of shelving would end up being about half that of the former door it replaces, so Begonia could lose a little weight in general.
To this end, Maryanne found a local tradie – another retiree with years of experience in the field – who took a look at Begonia and agreed to start work the next week.
There is a sign outside Norsand's office that says, "Contractors must check in with the office." To this end, the day before he was supposed to come, our guy called Murray, Norsand's owner and founder, to check in.
Murray wasn't having it. We had been allowed to use Trevor to replace our flooring because Norsand doesn't have a department that does that, so we weren't stepping on anybody's toes. They do, however, do antifouling, joinery, and fiberglass work, as well as a few other specialties. Our joinery guy called us with apologies saying that Murray had told him unequivocally that Norsand was a closed yard and that he was NOT welcome to work on Begonia.
This caused a bit of a kerfuffle. Murray has stepped back a bit from day-to-day operation of the boatyard, so he is technically not in charge, but he's there all day, every day, and he does own the place.
He came to Maryanne and asked her why she thought it was okay to hire an outside joiner. When she explained it to him, he then went off to have a little talk with the manager, presumably about the economics of turning down work. The next thing we knew, we were informed that Murray had a Norsand joiner working on his own boat, and that joiner was now to be almost exclusively at our service until the work was done. We were glad something we had been asking for for weeks was finally going to get started, while at the same time feeling bad about inadvertently getting anyone in trouble, and somewhat frustrated that this obvious solution hadn't been made available earlier.
When the expert arrived, Maryanne walked Marray's guy through her ideas on the project. Joinery in boats can be complicated because boats have few straight lines. Thus, each individual plank of each set of shelves has to be shaped to the curved hull behind. Even corresponding shelves on the opposite hull aren't exactly mirror images of one another, so each piece of wood needs to be custom cut for its specific location. This is one of the reasons we wanted a professional instead of trusting the job to ourselves. We just didn't think we had the time, amid all our other jobs, to be learning a new skill to do a job we hadn't budgeted our own time for in the first place (plus needing the right tools for the job!). Murray's guy has been doing marine joinery forever. He's even built whole boats from scratch. We were really looking forward to watching a seasoned expert at work, like we had come to do every time Premek showed up.
Alas, it was not to be. The guy was cordial enough, and he had some really nice tools, but he really seemed to be struggling to make a pattern of the curved wall for the shelves in our berth. After spending a whole day of trial and error and coming to what looked to Maryanne and I like being pretty close to the final result, he would scrap the whole thing. Then he would start all over from scratch using a completely different method. After doing this for a full day (his original estimate for the time to do the whole boat was a week), he seemed no closer to cutting an actual piece of shelving than when he had started. There goes that taxi meter again. Maryanne couldn't take it anymore and wanted to call it quits. The yard manager politely explained to her that this sort of work is not as easy as it looks and to please be patient. They finally agreed to the compromise of giving the guy one more day to see what progress is made on the shelves in our berth, and then we could reassess regarding the rest of the boat.
He did finish (kinda). The shelves looked okay. Not great, but okay. Looking at them, it was hard for us to feel like this is what a fifteen-hundred-dollar set of shelves should look like. The material used wasn't really that good, there one of the shelved didn't yet sit on its supports, and it needed some epoxy work to secure it properly to the wall (and treatment/painting of course). We decided that was as far as we were going to go with that task as far as the yard was concerned. Murray can have his guy back now. We didn't like the pace of the work, the quality of materials chosen, and the large gaps where the wood wasn't properly patterned to the walls, certainly not for the cost.
We hadn't expected that just ONE set of shelves, would take so long and still be only partially finished,
Knowing that our choice was to either to give up or do the joinery ourselves, Maryanne started reaching out.
We'd recently been visited by Lynda and her husband Jeff. Lynda is one of the three actual employees at our beloved resource Noonsite.com, and when she knew we were going to be visiting New Zealand again reached out to us so we could meet up. She came and took us out for coffee and cakes (a much appreciated break from the yard) and brought along her husband Jeff who was very generous with all sorts of support and tips on our projects. He was keen to help (but based way too far away), but with a few extra tools and some youtube videos we could probably do the shelving outselves; the difficult part would be finding a table saw to cut the wood from the giant sheets purchased; that we couldn't do.
Lynda, a sub-editor of the website Noonsite (beloved by all cruising sailors), visited us in the yard and treated us to coffee and cake. Here we are with Lynda, and with Bruce (another international cruiser in the boat yard at the same time)
As it happened, Maryanne and I were about to take a break from the yard and go visit some friends in New Zealand. Neither of us felt like we could possibly fit in the time from the relentless pressure of our haulout list, but I opined that we were not going to sail all the way to New Zealand and NOT visit friends we haven't seen for years and may not see again for many more. If we need to stay hauled out for another week to do so, so be it. She agreed, and we both worked like sled dogs to get to a logical pause point in the list.
Two of those friends were Nic and Caitlin, formerly of Mahana, but now living in a lovely beach community at the opposite end of North Island. Nic is a carpenter for the movie industry who has spent a whole career building unusual things which will end up being the only one ever made. Nic seemed like the perfect guy to ask for advice. (Later, out from under the weight of hundreds of jobs, I realized the other perfect guy to ask would have been my own brother, Darren. Darren is a luthier. Everything he builds is curved. Sorry, Darren). Nic told us to take all the measurements we can and load our rental car with anything we think might be relevant/useful. He'll see what he can do when we get to his house, and thus his workshop.
Norsand Boat Yard >> On google maps
Tip: We found this youtube video by "Boating with the Baileys" a HUGE help in dismantling and rebuilding our Lofrans Cayman 88 Windlass. The manufacturer offers no instructions, just a parts diagram - not even explaing what needs greasing/oiling nor what sequence things need to be done, we'd have been lost without the help of the Baileys!
