When we bought Pitufa, the previous owner had just had the topsides repainted, but hadn’t got round to doing the deck. He gave us a small discount and the already bought paint. After sailing the boat to Croatia we got cracking–and soon despaired. Some patches came off easily, but the rest was impossible: the non-skid paint layer on top was rock-hard, the filler like concrete and the primer just smeared into the metal and resisted all attempts to get it off. We tried heating it up, we tried chemical paint stripper–nothing worked. We tried our best (and sweatiest) with our angle grinders, managed to strip the paint off the aft deck and cockpit and then ran out of steam.
We thought we’d never leave if we got stuck on this project and set out cruising with a patchy paintwork. On an aluminium boat the paint is just cosmetic, the bare patches weren’t big enough to slide on when wet (yet) and so we decided we were okay and kept postponing the project.
Now we’re finally at a boatyard where we can dive into big projects. We arrived at Zeke’s boatyard in Carmen (Philippines) two weeks ago and discussed our long list of projects with Zeke. They work on a come-first-serve-first basis, so everyone here has to show some patience. It’s essential to be at the briefing every morning at 7 to get jobs and workers scheduled for the day and to arrange orders. Many of the cruisers here have been hanging around for months (some for years!) working on big projects.
For now we’ve been proceeding quite fast: after just two days we already got a spot in the marina, where work can start (later on we’ll have to get on the hard). It was quite a challenge to slide Pitufa into her spot in the packed, little basin, but everything went okay 
The day after, we already got two workers to start on the deck project: Ideally we would have liked to have the deck sandblasted, but they can’t do that here and work by hand instead. It took our two workers seven full days of hard work in sizzling hot, dusty conditions to get Pitufa all shiny showing her bare aluminium deck! We couldn’t have done it without them.
Of course our floating home has become a complete mess with dust covering everything, tools out to add to the chaos and extreme sauna-like conditions inside with all hatches closed. No way we could live there. Fortunately we found a really nice room in walking distance from the boatyard with gardens, a restaurant and even a swimming pool! It’s a green refuge away from the dust and noise and chaos of the boatyard…
