Captain's Blog

Well, it has rained most of the day today, and the same for yesterday. I need to get back started on finishing the new boat. SO… I went over to the Yamaha dealer and bought the motor. A nice new Yamaha 4 stroke 115hp outboard motor.

It’s been a long road… And it began with a drawing and a set of plans.

And this was then transferred from the plans to a basic male mold process.

First, you build a carport/boatport to build it under and build a set of strongbacks for the frame members to lay upon.

Then you build the frame on top of the strongbacks. And run battens along the length of the vessel.

And install a fake transom for framing.

Then you cover it with plastic and shrink wrap the plastic (with a hair dryer on “HOT”). And, begin placing the foam base for the male mold.

Then, you pick up 7 rolls of fibreglass and 2 drums of resin. You spend a day pre-cutting the glass to fit. You don’t want to cut it while you are laying it with the resin. Then the next day you invite over 7 of your best friends (that you could prossibly lose) for a very hot and sticky good time…

And now comes the hard part…. You move your whole dive operation 7 hours drive away to another city… It’s very necessary that you include this step, otherwise, you don’t get a true feeling for the entire process of picking up this honking heavy boat and mold.

So, after welding together a new trailer from parts and mild steel. You mount it for a long ride to another city. And, this is what it looks like sitting in the back yard, waiting for the final processes…

Hopefully, I can finish it before the neighbors complain. Depending on rain (this is the rainforest), this should only take 4 more weeks of hard labor…

Other than that, building websites and trying to get this dive op back up and running…

I’d rather be diving though…

If the boat building department here at Scuba Charters Headquarters can get this done in the next few weeks… I’m thinking party and a pay raise… I’ll even double their pay (2 x 0 = $0)… All the employees here work so cheap…

Here, at Scuba Charters headquarters, our marketing department (me) has finalized the rack card for the hotels and airports. And when I look at it…

Front

Back

I just say…. wow… did I do that??? I’m just gonna have to double the marketing departments salary… (2 x $0 = $0) Can’t wait…. Hope they come out as good as they look on the puter…

Just got them, and they look fabulous… Definitely gonna give the marketing department here at Scuba Charters a pay raise…

To truly appreciate how great it is when you have one of those picture perfect days, you need to see the bad days… One of the reasons that I moved my dive op to Panama, was to avoid the fury of Mother Nature. So far, I’ve done 12 hurricanes with boats… This is Hurricane Frances…

Fortunately, I hid in a protected river and avoided the aftermath of a Hurricanes fury… such as this…

The four hurricanes that walked through Florida in one month, made the diving non-existant… Fortunately, I was able to score alot of salvage work…. some of the worst diving on the planet… This is a pic of a sailboat hitting the Buchman bridge during hurricane Jeanne… Nothing I could do, they had locked down all the movable bridges, and I was too tall to get under them… All I could do was watch, along with others.

I used to do some towing and such for the local “save a boat” operations on a contract basis… The problem was that they would only call me when it was “hitting the fan” out in the middle of nowhere or the boat was too big for them. Or, when the boat was 40 or more miles out in the Atlantic… usually coincided with it “hitting the fan” also. Kinda miss that big old research/salvage vessel… Okay… here’s a pic of her… (named her after my Great Grandmother)… “Lady Margaret”…

Ohhhh… I’m getting all misty now…