It has been a busy week on board sailing vessel Wandering Dolphin in Hilo, Hawaii. We spent the first few days just decompressing, eating, eating, eating, and then we set about cleaning up the boat and doing maintenance.
Over a month at sea with six humans living in such a small space creates quite a mess. We scrubbed the boat top to bottom and restowed offshore gear for now. Beck and Benny washed ALL of our clothes (the clothes bins were empty and every stitch we owned needed to be washed.) The next day we took all of the cushion covers off and washed them while we let the foam air out. Some of the salon cushions had been repeatedly splashed with seawater and although we were always quick to clean it up before it soaked the foam the covers themselves were salt saturated and sticky.
The topsides were also in need of attention especially on the starboard side where, because the boat was healed over, the Awlgrip paint of the bootstripe and even above that had been submerged for weeks because we were on that tack for so long. The growth was terrible. There were little booger things and scummy growth that was super hard to remove. Because we are an aluminum boat I hate to use On-and-Off. The acid in it is VERY bad for aluminum so it scares me. This time I tried regular old Lime Away and it worked pretty well and after lots of work the boat looks pretty good again.
We still have to repair the mainsail where a seam has let go and there is a rip in a spot on the luff. We also need to rerig our boom vang where the rigid compression vang corroded through. I had seen that coming for years so it was not a surprise when it finally let go. For the rest of this voyage I will simply turn it into a regular boom vang. I have a toping lift so I don't really need the extra support of the rigid vang. It does help a lot when we use the boom to lift the dingy motor out of the cockpit and onto the dingy so we will eventually replace it.
Our friends fly in today for a visit so we will start to do some island exploring this week. We all want to find a nice waterfall pool to swim in like we did in Grenada and the kids are pretty keen to see a volcano in action.
We have had a lot of people ask us about our plans for the rest of our voyage. Because we had to spend so much time sitting in Panama waiting on the backstay, and then an extra week in Costa Rica while Beck flew home, we are about a month behind our planned schedule and really pressed for time if we want to make it to Alaska this summer. Right now we are playing with the idea of spending more time here in Hawaii and sailing to Washington state from here. If we do that we will plan on an Alaska trip next summer.
Thanks For Reading!
Captain Tofer, Becky, EmilyAnne, Kanyon, Kaleb, and Benny
We have sailed to Hawaii 5 times and also lived on most of the islands. We think your choice to spend more time in Hawaii is a good one. There are 68 different anchorages throughout the state however we think the best and most interesting are on the Kona side of the Big Island. Stick around until late July then head north back to the mainland. If you're big eaters then order a "Loco Moko".
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