…cause we needed another thing to happen in the midst of getting ready to leave, right? Right? I’m posting this from the depths of madness. I would have posted it three days ago, except that a plugin I use broke my blog for a while. Thank goodness for tech support.
Anyway… we’re waiting for our new Dyneema line to show up. We’re working on the engines and the winches and the fiberglass and for Mom to finish packing her house and get here and about a gazillion other things. So it’s natural, normal, and typical, that our bimini would choose, oh I dunno, now, to defenestrate. It didn’t just let go a little. Every single seam let go together. It was hanging onto the poles still, but it was a dicey thing. We put a tarp over it to keep it in place, but the wiggle factor was pretty insane.
Luckily, we have talent here in the Marina. We flagged down our neighbor Shahram Jami, who is a Canvas God. No, really. Knows his stuff. He volunteered to repair the bimini the first time it started disintegrating, and tactfully did not mention what he really thought. That was about six months ago. When Jason got him over to the boat to see the state of things, he very politely shook his head, and said “I won’t repair it. It’s totally shot. You need a new one.”
And honestly, despite the craziness around me, I was deeply in my heart of hearts, relieved. I’d been thinking of just restitching the old one, but everyone knows I hate sewing. H. A. T. E. So, here was my savior. The fabric was minutes away from following the stitching into oblivion, and as Shahram put it, “one serious gale you’re gonna lose the whole thing anyway.” Hm. That makes it not only a time and convenience issue to have him do it, but a safety issue as well. Score!
So they took down the navy blue disintegrating horror, and made it vanish. Jason had requested a shift to white, for the heat value, and I agreed for the light, and it was a deal. Shahram and his cohort Luis went away, to commune with the Canvas Fairies.
In the meantime, I needed to clean the bimini poles. They’re stainless steel, but hey, this is the marine environment, they corrode anyway. So I went after them with Barkeeper’s Friend on a wet washcloth. Luis asked me how long it had taken me, and I had to laugh. I did one pole, then Rowan needed me to read to him for a bit, then I did another pole, then it was time to cook dinner, then I did one more pole before bed… but the rust came off beautifully, which was what mattered in the end.
They came back just a few days later, with the new bimini, for a fitting. Kindly ignore the junk in the pictures; did I mention, chaos?
The fitting process was pretty involved, and the whole time they were doing it, I was offering up little prayers of gratitude that I had not attempted to do the thing myself. Straight lines it might mostly be, but honestly? 1/16″ wrong, and the thing no longer fits. That can’t be good. Or even reasonable.
And then… disaster struck. See, I was busy being all giddy that I didn’t have to sew the thing, and wasn’t adequately critical. Jason, however, is another story. He came out for inspection…
… and discovered that they’d forgotten the leather cap strip on the aft side. You know, the side the boom leans on, the side that people lean on when we’re underway, the side that everyone grabs on their way into the cockpit? No leather cap strip. So all the grunting and groaning and effort of getting the thing on there was wasted, and they needed to take it away for the repair.
No one was happy about it.
Here’s a photo of the missing cap strip. ::sigh::
They went away. Two hours later, they were back. And it was perfect.
This is Luis pointing out seam tolerance. ::shudder::
And this is Luis being happy with it all.
And this is Shahram lecturing me on how to take care of it properly.
The neat part of all of this is that Shahram needed rigging work, so we were able to trade for a significant part of the cost. The doubly neat part is that Luis does cushions, and is cutting us a deal on replacing the cockpit cushions, which are a horror that I will blog about on another day.
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