Been a while, lets catch up.

Yeah, yeah, I know, been too long betwen posts.

Truth is, it seems the progress has been so minutely incremental that posting the changes seemed a little pedestrian.

We've been steadily transforming the interior one painstaking step at a time.

While Brenda has been the master wood refinisher, I have been attacking the job of covering the walls and ceilings with laminate. More on that later.

First a bit of catch up on our environment.

On the first couple of days of December, the Northwest Coast was hit with the first of the winter storms. The National Weather Service issued warnings about the impending storm days in advance, forecasting Hurricane force winds for a sustained period. As you can see from pics, the Kaian sits high and dry on the hard, however boats have been know to be knocked off their stands by high winds. This was of more than a little concern to me given we would be inside the boat during the storm, so I set about making preparations. When the Kaian was initially moved to the work yard, the yard guys set up 4 stands or braces to support the boat, I started by adding an additional 6, making a total of 10 supports holding the 55,000 lbs of metal upright, hopefully. Then anything that could be moved by the wind got lashed down or moved inside the storage unit. We then stocked up on survival essentials, water, food, batteries, propane fuel etc and waited.

The storm was enormous, lasted 48hrs, peak wind gust clocked by the Coast Guard weather bouy on the Columbia River Bar was 148 mph, with a wave height of 72 ft, then the bouy dissapeared.

We sat in the boat, feeling the vibrations of the wind as it howled past us, the boat would shudder every now and then as we took a broadside gust, monster old growth trees came down , roofs were flying off buildings, the storm surge was pushing the extra high tide into the little bay behind us. Then the power went out. Would be 4 days before the lights came back on.

At one point, I ventured out to see what was happening in the marina basin only to find that a couple of the commercial crab boats had torn away their pilings and were doing the bumper boat routine while the hands on deck desparately tried to make them fast again.

We were lucky, no damage, no major inconvenience since we were prepared and fairly self sufficient, however up and down the coast, others were not as fortunate, a state of emergency was declared and the National Guard was called out. Here it is a month later and they're still cleaning up.

All Brenda and I could think of during the ordeal was, "and we're not even on the water yet".

Brings the reality of the phrase "any port in a storm" into focus.

The holiday season was a real adjustment for us. First one away from "home", friends and family. It was strange in the way that it was basically a "non event"for us. The upside was that it was essentially free of all the usual stresses involved with the preparations and arrangements that we usually make, the downside naturally was missing all of the loved ones that make for the warm and fuzzies at Christmas. We made the best of it with a long telephone call to where the family was gathered. Brenda cooked up a feast, the turkey turned out the be a chicken in disguise, (all that would fit into our small oven) the we invited a couple of bachelors who liveaboard their boats in the marina to break bread with us. Nice day was had by all.