Still Waiting

  No doubt 2015 will go down for me as one of the most difficult and unpleasant years that I can remember. Not only have I had to deal with a number of physical ailments requiring multitudes of trips to and from Juneau, as well as Anchorage at a fair amount of expense, but I've been waiting for months to get the boat done so I can go fishing. As you can see from the above pictures, the shipwright finally got the planks all put on. That was accomplished on Sunday. I was able to finish painting it, and got it ready to launch on Monday. Unfortunately, as I had mentioned previously, we had a very hot, dry spring.Almost every day in May was hot, sunny and windy, as well as a good bit of June. Wood, being what it is, has a tendency to dry out when exposed to sunny, hot, dry weather, as evidenced by all the wild fires in Alaska and the north west. Well, the old Bonnie J is made of wood planks, with cotton caulking in between and sealed with cement on the bottom. There was a problem with cement falling out of some of the seams, so I was systematically going around and reefing out the old cement and re-caulking and sealing the seams where I saw the need. Unfortunately, the work that I did wasn't sufficient. When I launched the boat on Monday, water started pouring in like someone had turned on a fire hose. I had three bilge pumps going and still couldn't  keep up. Fortunately I was still in the slings of the hoist, so it was a simple matter of hauling me back out. I don't doubt that the city will of course charge me again for hauling me out, a tidy little five or six hundred dollar expense. Governments seem to think that it's citizens are there to support them instead of the other way around. There is little room for compassion or compromise. As of now, I'm in the process of trying to find all the leaks and plugging them with new caulking. Its a very time consuming and painful process that requires me to lay on my back looking up or kneeling on my arthritic knees and trying to drive in the cotton with a caulking iron and a mallet. So much fun! I'm not sure how anyone is doing out fishing- today is the first day of the summer king salmon season. I used to have night mares that I was missing opening day. Like Job said- what I feared has come upon me. Oh well, there's little that I can do about it. At this point I'm just hoping that I can find all the leaks and fix them in a timely manner so that I can possibly salvage this season. If there is a silver lining in all of this hoo- haw, it's that I have spent so much money on medical bills, and on the boat, that I may not owe any taxes this year! Wouldn't that be a kick in the pants!