We’ve now spent almost 2 months in Zeke’s boatyard in Carmen. We’ve made great progress: Deck, transom and cockpit got finished just before the onset of the rainy season (phew) and are now sparkling white. We had a new bimini frame welded from aluminium pipes and our good old Yanmar got his 5000 hour service.
Now the work continues below decks:
We managed to hold on to our two painters who have been doing such reliable, high quality work outside (despite the high demand for workers here) and they are now varnishing inside! We emptied the aft cabin and head completely (we moved all gear from the lockers to the saloon–there’s not an inch of surface left and everything’s piled up high) and they spent a week sanding and varnishing there. Once the aft cabin is done, we’ll move all the gear back there, continue work in the salon and eventually all the gear that’s filling up the forecabin to the ceiling will have to move to the salon–you get the gist. And we have LOTS of stuff: in 15 years aboard we have accumulated everything we need for our jobs, hobbies, home-brew, spare parts, scrap material and of course sails…
In the meantime our carpenter has just started ripping out the galley in order to install new countertops and a new and better solution for the lids of our top-loader fridge.
There’s more demand than available workers, ordering parts is difficult and time consuming. Many boaters come here with huge projects and have complete refits done, so when we arrived, we were slightly shocked and disheartened to find that many of the cruisers already had been there for many months–in some cases years. We briefly considered turning around and just running away, but Pitufa was in desperate need for a major refurbishment that we had been postponing for years.
Now we’re glad we tackled the huge project! It’ll still take a while, but eventually she’ll look like new 
