La Vida Agua – Installment 2 (with video!)

I waited until we had completed our test run to post this one.  Enjoy!

My grandparents had a handy man they would call whenever something needed to be repaired around the cabin. In my juvenile memory, it seems that Lester could fix anything. Broken toaster? Call Lester.  Leaky roof? Call Lester. Dock repair? Busted pipes? Hole in the screen? Yep, Lester. The thing is, Lester was a country boy, born and raised in the mountains of North Georgia where time drifted on the wind, and therefore pinning it down was a completely foreign concept. The joke was that he would say he’d be there Tuesday, he just didn’t specify WHICH Tuesday. He was nevertheless a genius when it came to maintenance and repair. I tell you this story because getting work done here functions in pretty much the same way. The ‘Lesters’ of Abu Dhabi also grew up in environments where there wasn’t any emphasis put on the clock. However, just like my grandparents knew… if you have the right guy doing the work you accept the wait. So here we are over a month in, and all of the hoses for the power steering on Tao 1 have finally been manufactured according the exact specifics, and installed. We were then instructed not to touch anything and await their return to complete the repair.  A week or so later they returned, and almost finished.  Several days after that they were back to bleed the system and we had permission to take her out and check on repairs.

While this was all taking place, the process taught me that the spare room we want to use for a makeshift closet, will need to be fitted with lightweight and easy to move components. The starboard engine compartment is beneath that berth, and access needs to be simple, speedy, and stress-free. So I have to rethink the original plan. While it meets the concept of simple, it’s neither speedy nor stress free, so I’m spending lots of free time perusing the topic of storage in small spaces in general and boats in particular. So far I haven’t found anything that will work well in this particular situation, and at times throw up my hands thinking we should just chuck everything. Hopefully our storage unit arrives before I actually lose it and follow through on that thought.

The beds on board are super comfortable. The mattresses are thick, high density, good quality foam. In the 2 forward cabins, the mattresses rest on a flexible low profile bent wood frame that acts much like I imagine a box spring is supposed to. The size of those beds is equal to a Cal King, slightly longer and just a pinch narrower than a standard King, with one bottom corner lopped off at an angle to accommodate a plumbing run. The two aft cabin beds are more like platform beds with the same type of mattress, sans the spring effect beneath. Those appear to be like an extra-long Queen, slightly tapered at the far end, though not as much as a cuddy. Just enough to bring closer the feet or the heads of 2 people sharing. Fitting bottom sheets on any of these is yet another exercise in patience. I may have mentioned previously that both Larry and I are convinced that at least part of this journey for us is to learn to be more patient. We find the lesson almost every day in one form or another. Some days I think it’s working and we’re learning. Other days, not so much.

The best news is that we seem to have weathered the worst of the heat. The days, while not anything near what I would refer to as cool, or even bearable, are nonetheless quite suddenly lower in temp. I no longer see 45+ degrees noted on the Honda’s exterior thermometer.  (45 Celsius is 114 Fahrenheit)  In fact, it seems that we aren’t getting over 38 most days, which is +/- 100. This morning I took my coffee, breakfast, and book upstairs on the flybridge and read until after 10. It was 34 (roughly 90) and the humidity was just less than 50% when I finally took it inside. In my previous life this would still have been tough, but with a breeze coming off the sea today I found it was actually decent. Several nights ago we went over to a neighboring boat and shared an evening cocktail on their upper deck. It was lovely right up until the point that the breeze stopped and the humidity level rose drastically in 10 seconds flat. I am looking forward to the day when we can open the windows and doors all day and just let the (less humid) breeze blow right on through. Maybe another month or so. Speaking of the breezes blowing through… I was amazed to realize that we have 30 separate opening windows of various sizes on this dude. That’s a heckuva lot of air movement!  I cannot wait to get to the point where we can open them all up and be comfortable.

So back to the test run. We invited a couple of friends to ride along and took her out for a spin. It was a beautiful morning, and we motored around one of the many little nearby islands… the steering is fixed!  Yay! It was so nice to be able to hold a course and see results when I spun the wheel. See the wake in the video above?  Straight as an arrow. She purred like the large cat she is and to make it better, we had a great view of the Abu Dhabi skyline from out on the gulf.

We returned to the dock to find that nothing had moved from where it had been placed.  Dishes, glassware and spice rack all remained in their proper places, so we are good to go! Everybody had a celebratory cocktail (or two) and some lunch, and Larry and I breathed large sighs of relief.  Life is good.

(Video courtesy of our friend Habib Durrani.  Thanks Habib!)