currently in:  Glades Boat Storage yard, Moore Haven, FL

What. A. Day.

When we'd left the boat two years ago, we made a spreadsheet of all the things we (thought) we needed to do to get underway again, sorted by priority: 1 meant "must do before we get in the water", 2 meant "must do before going anywhere", 3 meant "must do soon", etc. When we saw Windom again we realized we needed to add a list of priority 0: "must do before we can even get started".

While we were doing the first item - removing the formaldehyde packets and airing out the interior - the police came, and we filled out a report and showed them the damage. Of the 14 boats broken into, we're the only owners here, so the police really wanted a statement. Not that we expect anything to be recovered. And since the stereo equipment was attached to the boat, as opposed to just sitting in it, the insurance company classifies it as boat gear rather than personal property, and the hull deductible applies, which means that it's pointless to make a claim.

Then we removed our rather sad and soggy dinghy from its home on the foredeck. We had turned it upside down and strapped it down, maybe thinking that it would protect a bit of the deck and be protected by its hard bottom. Well, that was a mistake. The layers of the material on the sides of the tubes were delaminating and cracked from the sun. I'm not sure what we should have done, though - with its rigid bottom, the dink's too big to stash below. I guess we should have made a cloth cover for it. Heck, it's clear now we should have tried to cover the whole boat!

Our next task was to strip the remaining tape from the teak. We'd applied so-called "7-year tape" over our teak to protect it from the sun. Half the tape had dried up, peeled off, and blown away - and the other half had chemically bonded to the finish on the teak. It took Britt and me more than an hour, I'd guess, to scrape the teak clean with chisels. I'm glad we don't have a lot of exterior teak; refinishing will be a pain, but is a lower priority task that can be done elsewhere.

For some stupid reason we'd left many of our lines (that's the nautical word for 'ropes', for you non-boaty people) out on deck, running through various blocks and chocks, and now they're all green and black with slimy mildew. We really have no idea why we left them out, because it was clearly a mistake - and it seems to us that if we'd thought about it, we'd have removed them, or at least gathered them into bags. Maybe we were addled by the July heat and desperate to get out of the yard. We gathered the icky bits of them up and soaked them in buckets with a bit of laundry detergent. We think we'll have to remove them and take them to a laundromat, if we can figure out how.

The rest of the day was spent cleaning the deck. Now, normally cleaning the deck takes about an hour and a little elbow grease. But normally our deck is merely dirty, not thickly caked with green slime and the detritus of mud-dauber hornet nests. We brewed up a nasty mix of oxalic acid, Lemon Joy, and water; Britt scrubbed the open spaces with a big, long-handled brush, and I used a small brush to get the small spots that he couldn't reach. I should point out here that the yard water here has a strong sulfurous stink, so every time we sluiced the deck (and our bodies) to clean off the chemicals, the smell of rotten eggs filled the air. The anchor locker was particularly foul - our formerly white fenders (inflated plastic cylinders we hang between the boat and the pier when we're at a dock) were completely black. More worrisome was the discovery of a great deal of corrosion on the anchor windlass motor, which is important, expensive, and difficult to replace. We also noted corrosion in many other places; we suspect the "fresh" water here is actually somewhat brackish, and that although we cleaned off all the salt from things, enough remained in the water to damage our equipment. But at least our deck is now - well, I wouldn't call it clean, exactly, but it's no longer horribly filthy.

The final thing we did was make the disheartening discovery that our batteries are all completely dead and will need to be replaced. At this point, if anything actually works when we turn it on, we will probably faint from the shock. But right now we're about ready to faint from exhaustion - time to call it a day. We've got a lot to do tomorrow!