Painting the Cross Trees

I’ve been wanting to get more comfortable at the cross trees, but haven’t yet had the opportunity, but today I did and boy am I ever comfy there. Katie and I sanded and painted the cross trees, getting up there with all the gear was the really hard part. I had one end of the extension cord tied to my harness and I had the bosuns’ bag with sanders in it slung around my neck and arm. Slowly climbed up trying to avoid chocking myself and not dropping anything.

Once we were both up there we tied the sanders to the cross trees and secured the extension cord and splitter. We then some how had to sand everything around us, under us and as well as reaching way out, some how we managed to do it all. With Katie, aka Monkey Toes, it made things easy because she’s really good at finding just the right spot. We ended up sitting on the futtocks, or really lounging on them to reach to sand a few places. Later when we painted we sat in that same place.

We also saw four manatees today, being in the rig gives you a great view of everything large in the water.

Lucky for us we got to use latex paint, not only does that dry fast but it also comes off of your skin and a bit of your clothing pretty well. We practically painted ourselves in because we usually hold on to the cross trees to get up and down. At the end of the day we liked that we were able to be up there with all that gear and work around everything really well. When we got down though, we noticed two large spots we had missed, but at least we are going to have to go back up there so that we can add textured paint on the top of the beams of the cross trees.

After cleaning up I was put to tarring some dead eyes on the mizzen top, but there wasn’t that much time left so didn’t have to tar too much.

Kat did more patch serving and a little tarring and Brooke painted the mizzen futtocks and the stuff around the dead eyes that I had primed yesterday.

Also made lemon squares tonight.

Kat hanging in her harness and patch serving.

Wonky corn bread, thanks crooked oven!