The bilge The bige.

Hi everybody 21st of july. Time is flying. Halfway through summer already..Bilges are being done today.Really mucky with a stagnant gunky pond smell. However when building this boat , cleaning of bilge was not thought out as ergonomically as you would think it would be.Thin gap disappearing out of sight in to the depths of the keel. Mark is cleaning as much as he can of the sides and will be buying a drill pump to suck the last water out. While working on the engine yesterday he dropped a nut.into THE BILGE.But he has a little magic twizzle stick. Looks like an old car aerial but has a strong magnet on the end. Well he went in to the murk and came back up with a screwdriver and nut . So we got a freebie.. Being a woman i am trying to understand why a small mesh tray was not inset into the bilge to prevent the likes of screwdrivers and important nuts bolts etc from ending up down a gap even i cant get my hand in.. But i am keeping my mouth shut as ;a nobody likes a smartarse and ;b There might be a bloody good reason for it. But;c I shall suggest to Mark before we set off  that we maybe use the spare mesh we have  to form some such intray thingy. So when the engine breaks down and it may be a bit choppy, that important, the last one i have nuts are not lost to the world beneath the murk.
I have been learning boaty words. Bootstrap - The painted  stripe between the antifoul and the hull. and now the cove- the concave or convex stripe just underneath the rubbing strake [ Theres another one, thanks uncle Tel]. It is purely decorative and is to show the lines of the boat and is traditionally painted gold. It  is also a major pain in the arse.It follows the lines of the boat so it isn't straight making masking it tiresome and as i have now noticed shows up every little imperfection on said boat..Gold paint is a wierd paint to use being very thick but going on very thin, so many coats are required and then just to piss you off even more the masking tape welds itself to the boat. .
Me being " ARTY" [ because non arty people like to make it sound like some sort of disease ] It was asssumed that i would find this job a dawdle, and if it had been my beloved acylic paints then it would have been easier. However i did not find it a dawdle and it amazed me at how stressy i got over it. It did not help with the umpteen lovely and well meaning boatyarders telling me the bits i had missed , it was the wrong weather to paint in. [ i  am well used to painting in the wind but not when it is like haveing a hairdryer blowing over you , come on i am from Scotland warm wind never. ]
We also have Petra, who i have taken an instant liking to but feel slightly inadequate compared to her.
The main reason i like her is that there is no fannying about she say's it as she sees it, and this is what she said. " No amount of gold paint is going to make it look any less like a tupperware box. "
LAL is not streamlined and not posh like the boat in one of my blogs getting lifted out of the water. But she is sound sturdy comfortable and just LAL. She reminds me of the dolphins less elegant cousin , the porpoise. Now Petra owns a beautiful 60 ft  dutch barge with a fantastic wooden mast and a huge dropboard keel. She is fixing a smaller dutch barge and has it moored up beside her.
The pairing in the harbour reminds me of a giant sperm whale with its calf.
I can see from her perspective that LAL is a bit of a tub..All i am saying is it is a good job i like her cos that little comment could have earned her a slap..Petra is going to be our Pilot across the channel to Dunkirk and i am so looking forward to 10 hours of haveing the piss taken out of me.
Well that is it for today. I do hope you are getting some enjoyment out of these blogs but mainly they are a record for me, something to look back on and have a laugh at and see just how rose tinted our glasses were.