Armouring Kiki

February 11th (Tuesday)

In the morning we went to the post office to mail the next blog stories to my parents. We also spent some time attempting to order food from Shearwater with the idea that it would be here on the barge this week. Unfortunately that did not work out, as there was a lot of ambiguity on the part of Shearwater as to whether or not the frozen meat items that we were trying to order would be able to remain frozen on the barge. They also had no sense as to when the barge would arrive. In the end we did not order anything from them, and so at least we saved money.  

While at the post office we met another lovely resident of the area named Eva.  We enjoyed playing with her two dogs outside, and she said that she had a lot of produce right now that needed to be eaten. She generously offered it to us, along with some other items from her freezer that were getting old. It has been amazing how kind everyone here has been to us.

Back at home we worked on Kiki in “The Shack”. 

We patterned out the shapes for the two, large, back armour patches using clear plastic so that we could lay it down and mark with a sharpie where we wanted it to be. 

Using this pattern we cut out the patches from our material and prepared all of the surfaces. 

We worked until 19:00 applying the patches to each side. We had to apply two coats of glue to all of the surfaces, and then use a heater from our boat as a heat gun to reactivate the glue and lay the patch bit by bit. We had to heat up an area and press it down, and then heat up the next part along and press that down. 

There were many bottles in "The Shack" left over from last year’s cruisers, so we used an empty wine bottle as a roller to remove all of the air bubbles, and to ensure full contact. Hopefully it worked well!