S/V Po Oino Roa: PROGRESS and SOME NEW DECISIONS

Pinoy Boat Yard
Port Carmen, Cebu
Philippines

As this blog title says "progress" on the new hard top progresses and with a bit of luck we hope to have it installed sometime next week. We recently added a third worker who does both sanding and painting and just yesterday added a fourth as a result of an important decision that we have just made.

The supporting frame work was finished on the boat, and our original plan was for me to brush the final top coat rather than dealing with the difficulty of masking a significant amount of the boat and having it sprayed. I managed two coats but we found that the new color was quite a bit different than what was on the existing cabin top and would never look good. Kathy and I discussed what options we had and then made the decision to go ahead and do a complete paint job even though the cabin and decks were done just over a year ago. This of course leads to budgetary questions and has an effect on the timeframe that we had previously planned on for leaving the Philippines. More talks and we have now decided that we will most likely stay here in the Philippines for another year getting projects done. The costs of getting work done here is so reasonable in comparison to anywhere else in the world especially back in the states we need to spend the time here and get it done. An example regarding wages this past week our workers compiled 117 total man hours, the labor bill will be 8,900 pesos or just over $200 US. that's and average of $1.76 US per hour.

The yard was on holiday schedule today, All Souls Day, so we had only one worker, Jing who sands and paints. He did the final sand and paint of the frame work and then managed the first coat of finish on the top side of the bimini. The other side was done previously so it should be just one more coat on each side and then installation.

We continue to come up with more projects for Lando our carpenter. Kathy bought a teak drink holder perhaps ten years ago and we have been storing it ever since as we could never figure out how to best mount it. It took she and Lando about ten minutes to figure the solution and the bracket has been made and after several coats of varnish it will be installed. Lando is now working on redoing a cabinet top and the navigation station top in the same manner as we had done for the saloon table. We have several more projects lined up for him.

Our plan is not to spend the whole of our extra time in the Philippines here in the the boat yard but for now we'll be staying busy here.

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