Breaux Bridge

So David Norman told us about this place where they play music every Saturday morning and of course everyone dances. It's only about 40 minutes from Jeanerette- we drove up this morning and caught the scene. One club, the Cafe des Artes, serves breakfast while a zydeco band plays- abandanddancing. People line up about 8:30 for tables- the lucky get breakfast- and by 11 or so it's winding down. Lots of tourists by now, but nobody seems to mind. The antique stores prosper.

On the way out of town we stopped at a coffee place, and everyone had migrated over there. This time, it was local cajun musicians jamming together. We are incapable of Real Dancing so we stole their images instead.

Building de boat

Started out the week by damn near killing both my guys. A 250 lb sheet of plate steel fell on both of them as they were under it trying to guide it into place. For some reason the engage/ disengage lever got tripped and the sucker came crashing down. Both of them got banged up and John gashed his finger pretty bad. We were very lucky, an important lesson learned. Being butch, they both laughed it off, saying that things like that happened all the time in a boat yard, but it scared the shit out of me.

The main cabin is starting to take shape and it looks great. It seems the main engine may have a cracked block and have to be replaced. While this may seem like a real bummer I'm not at all unhappy about it. It's an old naturally aspirated hugh clunker of a beast built to drag nets 24/7 at slow speeds and by todays standards is not at all efficient or clean. Given how they're clamping down on dirty truck diesels these days and given the price of fuel, this might turn out to be a blessing. The savings in fuel will pay for a new power plant in a couple of years time.Or maybe not, I have yet to get any quotes and replacing it with a smaller 8/71 may be the way to go. There are more diesels in La. than there are people and I have my guys looking. I must say that topping off their paychecks with a little bonus each week is really working out well. They're enjoying the project and are endlessly helpful with interesting ideas and suggestions.

We are still in our little shack in Jeanerette, the other house had disgusting old carpets thick with fleas and the dude refused to put in wood floors even after I offered to pay half the cost, which was kind of loco on my part as I'm only staying a few months. I was feeling bad about leaving here anyway, we're the only pink folks in this whole section of town and our neighbors have been great to us. It would have been a real insult to them to leave. When we move onto the boat I'm going to have to get a kilo of cocaine and roast a pig for them.

visiting the BIG boats

Rain Rain Rain

Storm blowing through, not the usual california drizzle, the pull off the road and hope the guy behind you did too, kind of storm. South Louisiana has a serious drainage problem, it's so flat the water just sits there. The countryside is truly gorgeous,lush, and green, the small towns are sleepy and composting. The big ones are MALL AMERICA, but hell, we're just passing through, and even they have great food and some of the best music I've ever heard.

We are still doing demo on parts of the boat, but also starting to reconstruct.
We had to take a bunch of flat bar steel to a large boatyard to put a bend in it so the roof of the cabin would have a nice slope. We also got the crane working to lift the steel and equipment around on the boat, it works like a charm and was hand built from scrap at the yard and two new 12V winches and a battery. The sucker can lift 9000 lbs. Big Fun. Still making refinements to it, but it will certainly pick up anything I may want to use as a tender.

on the hard

Boat up out of the water


Finally got the boat out of the water and on dry land friday around noon.It took an entire week of asking,pleading, cajoling, and screaming to get these dickheads to do something. I left a trail of tears. Had to apologize to Bruce the yard boss, I call him Triplets because he looks like he's about to have them. I explained to him that not all of us wanted to live and die in Dixie and that some of us were actually task oriented, we wake up in the morning hoping to get x, y, and z accomplished today. O.K., maybe not y and z, but could we give x a shot?
Sometime this fucking week? Had to explain to him that my people are German, and that we are a sweet and gentle folk who are loath to offend anyone for any reason, but we have this strange little quirk about getting things done and that it's not a good idea to take a nap on the tracks when we're coming down the line.

Entire nations have disappeared. Louisiana would be a snap, it's already been softened up by 300 years of inbreeding and a diet of fried milk. The mindless assholes actually pray night and day for the endtimes- no problemo, dude. Can do.

Enough already, John and Randy, my two welders are happy and working hard on chopping up the boat and next week we'll start to reconfigure her to host Joyce and me and our two cats rather than 50,000 lbs of frozen shrimp. I figured out that if I pay them a few dollars/hr more it makes a hugh difference to them. The yard pays them shit, but the difference of 44 to 49 dollars/hr to me is not much compared to the increase in work and general good vibes.

New Iberia stores

this is for Muz, and other fans of Posh and Naughty- that source of endless entertainment for Portsmouth RI.

Shipyard

deck of our boat
inside
John Sonnier
Lorenzo

Louisiana

Strange times in a strange land 2305 4th st, our little shack of a home, is starting get to us. The problem is basically that the windows don't open and it's stuffy. Nobody's windows open in this state, it's too goddamn hot and all manner of critters would crawl in and out, like our cats, who would love to roam, other cats, dogs, children, crackheads,bugs large and small, etc. The hood itself is actually pretty, green and lush in a way that you never find in California, but the folks here are really poor with little hope of escape.


Drugs are the only source of income and entertainment for the kids, but the buyers are their neighbors and parents and the whole place turns into a zoo when people come home from their 7 dollar/hour jobs. Like most slums, the kids with more than three brain cells firing have long gone, leaving behind the truly dumb and hopeless. Very much like the Italian neighborhood I grew up in and the Tenderloin where I passed out needles.


Lafayette, where we drive to every day to go to this fabulous gym with four pools,six various workout rooms, tennis courts, etc, and to hang out in a totally airconditioned environment is a white world dreamland.Malls as far as the eye can see. The fucking place is horrifying. It makes you long for a crowded jail cell in Mexico City. It's everything I hope to get away from FOREVER. Lord how we suffer.

Sat morning

Another week gone by. Things have settled down at the yard. I now have two guys working and both are happy and into the project. John, the older, is building a crane/davit to lift a tender and all the construction materials as we go so I won't have to go find the yard crane five times a day to lift and place steel. Randy is opening up the rudder room and doing a much larger hatch so I can use all that space for diving compressors and tanks.The deck over the hold is all cut up and ready to be pulled off and the rest of the boat is demoed and cleaned out. We've decided to get rid of the 2/71 genset, too big,a fuel hog,and needs to much work, and put in a new smaller Northern Lights generator. We'll see what condition the main 12/71 is in. Next week the boat gets pulled up and set "on the hard" to get sandblasted and have the bottom done. Hopefully the bottom steel is in good shape and we encounter no ugly surprises. This whole process is going to take longer than originally thought, but when it's over we'll have a much better idea of how this boat is put together and how to survive on it. We miss you all, write and let us know how you're doing.