Track Bolt and Surprise Visit

On Wednesday morning I "finished"a job that had proven to be more difficult than I had expected. I had a proud bolt on the starboard car track that prevented the car from moving forward more than a third of the track. When I tried to tighten it the bolt would simply go round and round, so I figured that the nut underneath was spinning. I calculated that the nut must be very close to the bulkhead separating the galley from the settee. I went to the trouble of dropping the ceiling panel over the galley and saw no bolt. I then did some awkward drilling and chiseling inside the storage area on the other side of the bulkead and found a bolt which a simple test confirmed was the next one forward of the problem one. I then did some drilling directly into the corner of the bulkhead until I was forced to stop when I struck solid fiberglass of the frame. I went to bed very frustrated. In the wee hours I figured out that if I could not get to that area neither could the person who had laid the track. I figured that whoever had done that job must have not factored in the location of the bulkhead underneath and maybe, just maybe, covered up his blunder by simply sticking in a bolt with no nut. And so it was. The bolt unscrewed easily bringing up some of the sealant that had been used. There was little to be gain from wallowing in the intense irritation that these sloppy work cover ups generate in my head and concluded that a true fix must await my return to Fremantle; so I filled up the hole with Sikaflex and shoved the bolt in. I left some of the white Sikaflex showing so that I would avoid placing the car over that position. The accompanying photo shows the bogus bolt ringed in white at the top left, and the galley vent that has tormented me with leaks on the right.

In the late afternoon I left the boat for a shower. As I approached the locked jetty gate I saw a man on the other side with an open cell phone in his hand. I figured that he required entry to visit a friend so I held the door wide open to let him through. I had been more correct than I could imagine: the friend he was going to visit was me, and Brenda. It was Simeon from the Port Townsend area. Brenda and I had met Simeon on the bridge of a historic tug boat on display at the Wooden Boat Show and we had subsequently engaged in some correspondence regarding his quest to find his family boat that last he heard was in Tasmania. (He was successful.)

Simeon introduced himself and what a delightful surprise it was. He and his wife were in the SF area for Thanksgiving. From the blog Simeon was familiar with Pachuca and her crew. He recognized the boat from a distance, knew the cause of the rust line on the bow plate, and knew what the bicycle on the deck was all about. After a short chat among the three of us in the cabin I asked him if he wanted me to show him the boat and he said he didn't need to because he knew all about it from the blog. He mentioned something that I had published on the log and it had been so long ago that I could not remember it. Simeon had read every blog entry from the very first one when I was still preparing the boat for the circumnavigation.

Jim happened to drop by later and he and Simeon had a chat about boats and kayaks in particular. The accompanying photos were taken by Brenda (the top one) and Simeon (the rest). In the top two photos Jim is on the left and Simeon is in the middle. In the background is a gorgeous Honolulu-like twilight with San Francisco in the background.


The bottom photo is a clever one of Pachuca's mast against a half moon. I hope that it shows up well in this blog.