Teak Bungs in the Time of COVID-19

It’s been a while since my last bombshell update, but surprisingly little has happened. I mean, we’ve returned to New Zealand, put the boat up for sale, moved into a marina, and been locked down for a month.

But other than that, not much has happened. At least that’s what it feels like.

The world is on fire, but that’s a totally different story than what we’ve been up to. What we’ve been up to mostly is lying low, making Zoom calls, eating too much ice cream, and making the boat look prettier one small step at a time.

Updates on the Boat

In the last post we made the decision to sell the boat. At the time, we hadn’t fully researched the local tax implications of listing it in NZ but were concerned about some of the language in our clearance paperwork. Since January we consulted with some brokers. We spoke to a U.S. based broker than had no interest in selling her for us, and had a couple of conversations with NZ brokers who filled us in on the guidelines for selling her here in NZ.

So we went ahead and listed her.

A week or so after the listing hit Yachtworld, New Zealand closed down completely.

Before then, the borders were tightening, and by the time the listing was up any foreign visitors to New Zealand would require a two week self isolation period, but very shortly afterwards even that wasn’t an option.

Even travel within New Zealand has been restricted, and with the isolation rules in effect we wouldn’t be allowed to have anyone on the boat for a showing anyway.

So nothing has changed in her status, outside of being officially for sale.

The Work List

There’s always a work list. Always. The question is, how urgent is it?

After showing our boat to a couple of brokers, we realized that while Evenstar is rock-solid and well equipped to leave for Fiji tomorrow, there were some things to deal with from an aesthetic perspective to approve the “curb appeal” of the boat to prospective buyers. From worn cushions and missing teak bungs, to flaking bright-work and rusty ground tackle, a lot needed to be tidied up.

None of it would affect the boat’s ability to cruise, but would affect her ability to be sold. So we began a full court press to get the boat up to a higher aesthetic level than full time liveaboards at anchor are ever used to. In the window between making the call to sell the boat and NZ shutting down we managed to complete a few things, including:

• Replace the anchor chain, since the old one was rusty and we could not get it re-galvanized (longer story there).
• Re-galvanized the anchor.
• Re-upholstered the saloon settees, chairs, and nav station
• Re-upholstered the cockpit cushions
• Cut, buff and wax the hull and topsides
• Clean up and polish a lot of brass and stainless steel
• Started sanding and cleaning the brightwork
• Prepared to replace many missing teak bungs (getting tools and teak organized)

We did all this with a “let’s get it all done yesterday” mentality, because we wanted to get pictures ready for the brokerage listing as soon as possible, and have the boat ready to show. Some of these we did ourselves, some we hired out. But in very short order we got the boat ready to take some of the nice pictures you see in the listing and on the “About Evenstar” page now.

She really is looking good.

But there’s always more to do.

Teak Bungs

As you may have guessed from the title, I’m a little fixated on teak bungs. Those are the little plugs of wood that fill the screw-holes through the teak deck. On our boat, the screws are not structural, they’re only put in when the teak is installed to hold it while the bedding cures.

When I re-caulked the teak a decade ago, I replaced a lot of bungs. And every bung I didn’t replace got sanded, making them thinner. Since about a week after I finished that job, those old bungs have been slowly popping out. I knew this and watched it happen, but I didn’t replace them over the years. So in January, at a rough count, I estimated I had about 2,200 +/- to replace.

They screws don’t do anything, but without the bungs they look terrible. So the goal of this project is to take a deck which looks like this:

With a deck that looks like this:

Eventually, those sanded light spots will fade into the gray color and match the deck, and you won’t even be able to tell the bungs were missing in the spots I didn’t screw up too badly.

It’s a lot of work, because I have to do everything from cutting my own plugs from a teak board on a drill press I bought just for the job, to drilling out the old holes, tapping in the bungs, cutting them, and hand sanding them down to blend into the existing wood. It’s a slow job, but I try to do a little every day.

Sometimes, I even succeed. Unfortunately, with the lockdown preventing any showings for at least six weeks some of the urgency has been lost. My “If I can do 100 bungs a day I can finish this in three weeks” idealism hasn’t quite survived contact with the teak.

Varnish & Brightwork

As I type this, my head is gradually clearing from the smell of varnish fumes and paint thinner wafting down the companionway from the cockpit. It’s a cheap rush, which is good since the only way to replenish the hard liquor is to arrange delivery to the boat.

Kathy has her own special ongoing Herculean labor – cleaning up the bright work.

Varnishing bright work (the shiny, pretty wood on a boat) is a job which requires patience, care, attention to detail, dedication, an eye for aesthetics, and a willingness to do the same job 7-10 times in a row before it’s done. Which is why I’m better suited to drilling holes in the deck and banging teak bungs with a mallet while Kathy tackles this.

We don’t have much brightwork, but it’s enough so that it can get to looking terrible if you don’t keep up on the varnish. I’ve give you three guesses at how many varnish touch-ups I’ve done in the last few years.

Unfortunately, most of the brightwork is around the cockpit, essentially the front door of the boat. So a prospective buyer may walk down the dock and be awed by the shiny hull and topsides, in bliss over the anchor and chain, astounded by the lack of missing bungs in the deck, and still give a resounding “blech” at the brightwork before they ever get a chance to get blown away by the spiffy new upholstery.

It’s a long process. A proper varnish job takes at least seven coats and preferably ten to get that deep, rich, glossy shine. Each coat takes a day to dry (or more if it’s cooler), and must be sanded between coats and cleaned of all dust and residue. So you can’t just sit down and do it all at once, you have to keep at it a little bit every day for a couple of weeks to do it all properly.

It also means we’ve had our companionway disassembled and been unable to completely seal the saloon, which is a special treat as we head into fall with cooler nights. But it will be worth it, as it’s starting to look really nice.

Life Under Level 4 Lockdown

New Zealand has done a bang-up job dealing with COVID-19, and have nearly eliminated the virus in the wild. This was done by shutting the country down almost completely. Restrictions on regional travel, which businesses can open (groceries and gas stations and a few other essentials), and very strong guidelines on social isolation and distancing have made a huge difference.

But not without a cost. Costs to the freedom to move, costs to the local businesses and service providers. But the people here are resilient and have taken this seriously, and the results show it.

Marina Life

Prior to the shutdown, we made the decision to come up to the Town Basin Marina in Whangarei for a couple of days once the boat was relaunched. We kind of had to, since the anchor was still at the galvanizing shop. But as we scrambled on our boat preparation tasks, we realized that since we’re serious about selling the boat, staying in the marina for a while would make that easier. It would make getting the work done easier, waste less time on thing like shopping, food, getting water and so on, and as a result give us more time for boat tasks. (yay!)

So we decided to hang out for a month or two more in the marina. This is way outside our normal pattern of behavior, as we prefer to anchor out. But it turned out to be a lucky decision for us, as the shutdowns were announced a short while later.

Cruisers are ordinarily a social lot, but “social distancing” was becoming all the rage. The local VHF radio net had shut down shortly after we arrived, but I decided I needed to talk to people, in particular at this time since information sharing is so important. So I re-started the net myself, the first morning shouting in the void with no one hearing. But in short order, we had participants, volunteers to take a few days as net controller, and a daily lively net.

We also set up a Facebook group for all the liveaboards on lockdown here, which proved to be a good resource for not only information exchanges, but socialization, cooperating, and staying in touch when we aren’t allowed to host other people on our boats. A couple of other boats have stepped up to receive packages and mail, act as the bank for exchanging laundry coins, and help people out with tools and other needs.

Once or twice a week we’ve even been having “Sundowners” via Zoom, sharing stories and laughs via video conference instead of dinghying over to each other’s boats.

I’m glad we ended up in a marina for this; it’s been more than just convenient being able to walk to groceries. We feel connected to the community even if we’ve not been within six or eight feet of another person in weeks.

Lockdown Rules

The lockdown rules for us have been less onerous than for the locals, I am sure. We don’t have any family here, and the friends we have we’ve made since arriving. We bought a car, but have nowhere to go.

So the rules that really affect the Kiwis about funerals, weddings, social gatherings, work, and play don’t hit us as hard because most of them don’t apply.

The New Zealand government has been fantastic through this. Back in February, when all this started, we reached out to an immigration lawyer because we were nervous, to understate the situation. Our visas were due to expire by June, but the handwriting was already on the wall that most of the South Pacific countries would be closing their borders soon.

The nightmare scenario would be having to leave New Zealand because of visa issues, but have literally nowhere within thousands of miles where we could safely go.

But then we received an e-mail from immigration telling us that ALL tourist visas were getting extended automatically until mid September. They didn’t have to do that, and we appreciate it. It was an incredibly compassionate gesture, and not one I’d expect my own government to make for trapped travelers in our situation.

There’s still some stress over what happens if the South Pacific doesn’t open by August, but we felt a huge weight lift from our shoulders when we got that notice.

But for now, we wait until the alert level lowers and see what develops. We’ve got a secure spot for the next few months, but beyond that there’s not much we can do.