Note: Although this is being written in Dec 2023, this is about our trip in July 2023.
After nearly a year, I flew back to Calista on July 6. Calista was mostly in good shape but there was still a ton of work needed to get ready to sail later in the month.
Calista was ‘med-moored’ in a row of catamarans. Med-mooring is when bow and stern are both tied. In this case, there are 4 lines from a sunken cable in front of the boat, with two being attached to cleats on Calista’s two bows. You can see the ties from the stern cleats to a bollard on the wall. Calista was held firmly in place by these lines but this also caused a problem. To come aboard, you needed to get on the catamaran on the left and climb over the life-lines of each boat. Apparently in doing this, someone put enough lateral force on the port aft stanchions that they were ripped out through the fiberglass deck.
The damage is under the two stanchion feet under the Lifesling.
Closeup of the damage. The bolt on the right pulled through, the one on the left snapped.
Stanchion removed. The problem bolts went into threaded holes in the two center feet. The one that had snapped had to be drilled and extracted. The fix was long and difficult. First, the two damaged holes in the deck had to be ground out, removing all the damaged fiberglass so that everything left was structurally sound. For both holes, this area ended up being a significantly larger hole, about the diameter of the stanchion feet. Then the underside of each hole had to be blocked and epoxy poured in. Once that cured (24 hrs later) I drilled new holes through the epoxy for the bolts. Next, the stanchion needed to be put back in place with calking on the holes to prevent leakage and all the bolts connected. This was not just the two damaged holes, but you can see that there are another 3 bolts on the foot on the left and one for the foot on the right. I was unable to get the bolts for the two center feet to thread. I worked for hours on this with Gilles (need a person on deck handling the stanchion and another inside inserting and tightening the bolts). After trying and failing many times, we put bolts into the feet that would poke down into the holes. This finally worked!
Adding to the fun, in the middle of this work, I was taken out for two days by a bad fever, nausea, headache and shakes. Don’t know what it was but I was a basket case for a day and took another to recover. Peggy did what she could to help over the phone, getting me on electrolytes and motrin but that was about all she could do from San Diego.
After recovering, there were still many jobs to do. There were some electrical problems to debug and water tanks to fill. I needed to get the water-maker running again (it had been ‘pickled’ which is filling with a solution that prevents bacterial growth in the membranes when not being used), and a lot of cleaning.
Each evening I tried to take a long walk up the steep hills just across the hwy from the marina. I needed the exercise and saw some great sunsets.
Before leaving the boat last October, Peggy & Gilles had pulled down, folded and stored the jib and replaced many of the running rigging lines with older lines that we did not care if they stood in the sun for 9 months. Now all that work needed to be reversed to get Calista ready to sail. And ALL the boat systems / equipment needed to be tested to ensure they were working. Unused equipment has a tendency to break down when left in a hot, humid, salt-air environment. I got most of it done before Peggy arrived July 19. A day later, guests arrived, but I will leave that for the next post.