We’re about to take the Vaka Hop’e out of the water after 6 months of service. I have felt depressed over the last couple of weeks and I think my mood reflects the mood of the Vaka Hop’e. For the past few weeks, she has been sitting in the water, nobody sailing her or taking care of her. Billy sleeps overnight, but no activity happens during the day. A boat needs to move. A boat needs a purpose. And so do I. Over the past few weeks, we have prepared to take the boat up on land, but my burdens will not be made lighter until the boat is finally out of the water and safe.
Building new decks
Two weeks ago we started logging in the jungle. I knew our decks were cracking and rotting, so we bought a canoe tree (white beech) in the jungle to replace our decks. But to make use of the tree we needed to cut it down and mill it into the size we needed. We spent the whole week in that jungle, YWAMers and a chainsaw operator, sometimes joined by local youth. We cut down the tree, split it in the middle, and cut it to size. Finally, we used a chainsaw mill to get out the planks we needed for the decks and carried everything out. Thankfully our truck got fixed after two months of sitting still and we were able to drive everything down. Now the planks are at the sawmill to dry and get planed down to the right thickness.
Building a house
We need a place to store the boat, and we don’t have our own land yet. We do have a container where we planned to store the boat, but it is currently occupied by tonnes of cement for a building project. We also have a second container, which is filled with drilling equipment. So, in the end, we were able to split the two containers apart and build a roof in between. We filled the ground with gravel and covered the roof with sago palm leaves, like local houses. Our container house is like a contemporary fusion of the Solomon Islands, mixing the new with the old. We had lots of help from people in the village who harvested the leaves and helped us sow them together.
Building a trolley
I knew early on that we would have to move the boat quite the distance. In the Philippines, we moved the hulls for a short distance Egyptian style with logs, but this time I feared that would be insufficient. In my head, I had an idea of building a single trolley on an axle with car wheels. I wasn’t sure how we would find an axle, but amazingly YWAM had one that fit perfectly! It was previously used to transport a drilling rig, but now we could use it to transport our boat. I did some CAD on my computer, coming up with a design and the different lengths of steel we would need. I bought the steel and cut it up, and Matthew, a friend from Australia who came over to help take the boat up, was able to weld it all together. Now we had our trolley, but would it fit? There’s no way to know until we try…
Final preparations
Before we could take the boat up, a couple of things needed to be taken care of. First, I needed to go over the boat and pack everything up. Over the past 6 months, we have accumulated a bit of stuff, and I want to organize it to the best of my ability. Then there was the dreaded job of scaping the hulls… We have had problems with our hulls ever since we received the boat. The keel has been reinforced but not antifouled. This year we bought and applied antifouling, but it didn’t last long, and soon growth appeared. I have tried to stay on top of things, but for the past couple of months, I have moved off the boat and not followed up. Now I had to attack it with a putty knife to get the thick layer of shells off. The knife broke and the sun was going down. We had to drive the boat to the place where we would beach it and take it up the next day.
Ready or not…
I didn’t feel ready when we launched the boat in February and I don’t feel ready to take it up now. There are always more things that can be done and organized, but at some point, you just need to say enough is enough. We beached the boat at sunset and carried some of our stuff off. This time I hadn’t even taken our masts down, so that would have to wait until tomorrow. I want all of the YWAM boys to be involved to learn as much as possible from the experience. We go home for dinner and return at 10 PM to pull the boat up a little further. As I go to bed that night, I feel anxious but ready. Here we go!