New old dreams

Sailed a lot on cats in my earlier years... may be a more stable platform for my ladies...  and a bit faster for myself... Like the fact I don't have to source, measure and cut everything either. But the $10K bite needs some pondering.

Other type of building

Our little island, like the rest of the world needs some quick lessons on how to make decisions. Since this is my area of work I setup a blog. It is a lot like building and sailing a boat.

Second second stringer

The second stringer consists of two smaller stringer of 1x1cm. In the past I have done this to enable better twisting and bending. But it does take more time in total. Thinking of making the 3rd stringer of one piece and wet it before bending. This will save time and make the finishing a whole lot easier.

Not much progress to be seen:

Steps

It is weird; how for months there is no desire at all to even clean up the workspace, let alone do any work on the little Sherpa ship.

But somehow yesterday and today it was there. The feeling inside, the elephant we cannot control: the "must work on little ship" feeling.

So the shop was "cleaned" and organized a bit first. Then today the starboard and port (half) stringers were fitted and glued into place.

As you can see the second stringers are half stringers; i cut 1x1 cm stringers and let them soak in water and formed the curve (instead of letting it flat). The little ship has a very bendy hull so to prevent snapping and splinters flying around I opted for a pre-bend of the pitch-pine.  I also hope to make the fitting of the other half easier because they will already have something to clamp to.

The stringers hanging from the ceiling will have to be patient...

Empty paradise

Flag, Asimov and learning

Today Aruba celebrates her Flag and Anthem. 

Of course all the festivities have been cancelled. The last few tourists are leaving the island. Tomorrow the RIU for example will be empty. They have about 800 rooms. All contractors are already sent home and the employees will hear tomorrow what will happen to them.  Without our guests what remains of our little paradise in the Caribbean? We can use the time to polish it up while we now have a chance. We could fix our water treatment system which is 40 years old, breaking apart and not big enough for the amount of rooms.

The first death happened in our sister island of Curacao today. We have 125 persons in quarantine. 

I believe it was one of Asimov's stories which talks about humans as the true viruses in this world.  The last 50 years we have grown (exponentially) so fast and smothering the Earth with CO2 and our other waste products...  Are we being shown how that must feel?  What lessons are we to learn? 

After all this mess it will be interesting to see how much we have learnt from all this and have grown up to be more responsible.

Eerie

Empty incoming flights, empty restaurants, much fewer people from huge cruise ships...  The first two cases have been registered. The clock is ticking while we do not know how many invisible cases there are. Fear pops up. Eventually we will get through this. In the mean time, Spray and Pray.

When this is all over we will be ready to receive our guests again.