| Saturday December 15th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
The ship's high and dry, 33 degrees with full shore power. Ice on the docks and ramp to the ship once again, and we're preparing for a healthy dose of rain starting Monday. Managed to climb the slippery ramp this morning but now I'm iced in on the old girl until the sun breaks out or the temp goes up. Very foggy with several large tankers going up and down the San Joaquin river this morning; sounding their fog-horns and at 0530 .. right outside the office (radio shack) W/T door it really wakes you up. Winter on Bradford Island slows down everything related to the ship.
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| Friday November 16th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Our repairs are all complete on the exterior port side patch and we just have a few details left to complete inside the Fwd Engine Room.
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| Tuesday November 6th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Our carpenter project is still incomplete, and it's very difficult when you break a tool or need some more of something when you're on an island, or pushing to make the last ferry and still try to finish up before 1700 so the carpenter can leave the island. We'll hopefully finish this chore on Monday next. Our little camel/float performed quite well and didn't leak.
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| Monday November 5th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Our focus will be the completion of our port side repairs in the hull today. We were able to successfully launch our little camel/float yesterday late afternoon and she's riding high and dry this morning so we'll probably use it to complete the project.
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| Wednesday October 31st, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Happy Halloween... I'll be at the costume ball on the Lucid tonight. I'm going as an old broken down - rusty (iron man) hermit that lives on a deserted island - in a truck - with no social life; searching for money and volunteers to repair a very special old wooden ship that has an important place in the history of naval warfare. ''Trick or Treat'' [BIG GRIN] Wish you were here. There was an earthquake in the bay area last night. My little ''RV'' rocked and rolled for about 30 seconds off and on, a little after 2000 hrs and I thought someone was outside shaking or pushing on it. It's still too dark to tell if there was any damage on the property but I don't think it was that strong here. I did buy a 1/2'' electric impact yesterday, and couldn't find anything larger. We tried it and it will work, but is time consuming. I'm going to have to rent a larger capacity gasoline powered air compressor to complete this because we don't have 220v out here on the property for the bigger electric ones.
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| Tuesday October 30th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Well we didn't finish our project yesterday, primarily because the small air compressor we have – plus the carpenter's compressor won't maintain enough pressure/volume to punch the 1/2 X 8'' lag bolts through the old hull wood and the new planking – even with a 3/8 '' pilot hole drilled, with either a 1/2 '' drive or 3/4'' air impact so we lost some time today. I'm off the island today to buy an electric impact to see if we can do it that way.
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| Sunday October 28th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
It looks like we won't have our float/camel quite ready to put in the water for our carpenter's visit on Monday so we'll use the first little boat/scaffold rig we had when we started. We've got a lot of time and effort in the new camel now and we've used more materials (Bondo & fiberglass) than we thought we would, so I'm off the island at 1100 today to get some more. We'll take our time and hopefully do it right.
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| Tuesday October 23rd, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
We didn't accomplish as much as we had hoped yesterday, and our old table saw almost bit the (saw) dust'' ripping all the 10'' hull wood to 8''. We're set up again for next Monday and if all works like we think, we should be able to finish this project. With the addition of a few new hand tools-some saw blades and a fair amount of screws-lags-nails, some wood and miscellaneous supplies, the project cost will be a little over $4000. We could certainly use some new thoughts on how to help finance these particular repair projects that we must pay tradesmen to do because we don't have the skilled minesweeping or civilian volunteers out here to assist for whatever reasons. I'm fairly certain our isolation out on the island, is primarily responsible for our lack of volunteerism, but it's also due to poor communication (or the lack of it) on our part, to the minesweeping community in general.
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| Monday October 22nd, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Another extreme low tide and we're listing to starboard in the mud again until around 0915, according to the tide chart. Most of next week they're forecasting minus tides but we normally ride those without hitting bottom. Our carpenter (Andrew) would like to finish the port side project today with putting the old boat/scaffold back in because the camel isn't ready, but he's got his hands full to get all that done. Rex, Barry and I will be his helpers so that'll most likely slow him down considerably. <> There's a lot to complete today so we'll probably be finishing it up next Monday.
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| Sunday October 21st, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
We have an extremely low tide and the ships definitely in the mud. This happens on occasion and the tide chart doesn't reflect it for today, but it's one of the lowest (if not the lowest) – minus tides I've seen in the time I've been here. This makes for a fairly noticeable starboard list and we don't have an inclinometer, so I can't tell you exactly what the degree may be, but with a torpedo level, I reckon it's close to 15 degrees. We accomplished quite a bit yesterday on our camel project (which has truly become a major project) and I really screwed that one up by assuming that the several tiny holes that we could see, wouldn't cause that much of a problem and we could use a 12 volt battery operated bilge pump with a float valve on occasion to keep it afloat. Well, it went straight to the bottom in less than a few hours, so I know now that we'll seal them with fiberglass. We're also working on installing a new wood transom on it. It's fairly important to have some way to get all around the ship's hull (exterior) as we go forward here, and the floating scaffolding/camel (if you will) is the best we have to work with.
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| Saturday October 20th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Most of the weekend is planned around trying to fix our camel float so we can start using it to remove some of the ''scrub wood'' vertical wood from the hull and continue preparing for our hull painting at a later date ''TBD''.
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| Tuesday October 16th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
We've had sporadic rain since about 0300 and expecting more as the day progresses. Our carpenter has rescheduled for Monday the 22nd. Our little working camel has quite a few leaks and was almost sunk this morning. Needless to say, we have to work on it some before our carpenter comes Monday.
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| Sunday October 14th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Over the course of the last few days, we've progressively lost our somewhat crude scaffold we have been using for the repairs on the port side of the hull and have removed what was left of it. We'll be putting a different type in the water today for not only this project but also to be used as a form of camel.
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| Monday October 8th, 2007 |
| Submitted By: Mike Warren |
Our carpenter is planning on having our framing complete today and it's always a long hard day working as his helper because keeping up with a 29 year old, very capable young man is somewhat difficult, especially on the side of a ship with levee rocks and water hazards to be aware of.
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