If you want to know the honest truth (and in case my rainy little video didn’t already convey the message), I don’t exactly love it in the workyard. Yes, it’s satisfying to do projects and make our boat a safer, prettier vessel… but it’s also a lot of mess, physical work (not my specialty haha), and freaking effort.
Yesterday, for example, I was pretty sure that I was sanding my fingerprints off. I mentioned this to Jon, and with a little eye-roll he assured me that this was highly unlikely; he also suggested that I should put my new bank-robbing schemes aside, as my measly few days of wet-sanding the decks were not nearly enough to remove fingerprints. Damn.
(we’re painting our decks — just in case you were wondering) (and today’s fun discovery? that yesterday when the boat beside us was spraying sail-cote on their mast, a bit of that waxy stuff drifted up on to our boat without us noticing…) (which when we started painting today was an unhappy discovery!! we now have a slightly leopard–spotted–esque half of a cabin-top) (the painter is unhappy) (but this is the danger of doing work in the workyard in the middle of the desert!)
Anyways, I’m trying to tell a nice story here so let me get back on track. The upside to the workyard is hands-down the people. Last night, for example, after a day of working and no showers (they have turned off the water in the entire town of San Carlos) (for two days) (so we smell reeeeeal good haha) we were invited to tag along to an out-of-the-way seafood place that friends of ours had been to four years ago. This place closes at sunset (as all good restaurants must??), so we all piled into the back of a pickup truck at 4:30, drove out past the hotels and marinas and houses, down a dusty little road, through a pretty Mexican fishing village, and, stopping only once to ask a beautiful 12-year old girl with a baby on her hip and her little brother by her side if we were headed the right way or not, out to this restaurant in the middle of nowhere.
Once there, we enjoyed some really excellent food — Jon ate the “pulpo enamorado” (which translates to “octopus in love” — very good for the honeymooners ;)), others had shrimp or oysters or tuna, and we swapped stories and sea tales, had some “Coca in Vidrio” (coke in glass bottles — so much better that way), and then, a few hours later, piled back in to the truck to drive back to our boats.
And it was as Jon and I were lying in the back of that pickup truck, on top of some exceptionally comfortable cushions that had come out of “Que Linda” (our neighbours’ boat), bouncing up and down as we drove down this dusty road, holding hands with bellies full of deliciousness and talking about what an awesome dinner we had, that it hit me. This is why we do this. Moments like these are the exact reason that we push through the workyard weeks, save hard in the summers, and try to make this happen…
Fingerprints or not 😉