Underwater Plongee

Plongee Tom

April 6th, 2015 Carlisle Bay or Clean Your Bottom Bay

Plongee in French for scuba diving or snorkeling.  We see that word a lot in the French islands.  It's a funny sounding word - plongee - sounds like p-lawn-gee.  Once it gets into in my head, I can't stop saying to myself.  Plongee, plongee ,plongee...it just bounces around in there.  I really like it.

Plongee, plongee, plongee - see...fun to say

Anyway,  Tom got out all his dive gear and went into full plongee mode under our boat.  First he did some scraping of the prop, shaft and propeller.

Time to get busy

Then he tried to put on the new line cutter.  However, the current was just to strong to keep him from doing that delicate work.

The line cutter

Can you see the sharp edge

Can you see both sharp sides

Next he put on a new zinc on the shaft.  For your non-boaters, zincs are sacrificial pieces of metal put on boats to keep important metal things from corroding.  In other words, the zincs gets eaten away by corrosion first thus saving the important stuff like the shaft.

Then he gave the bottom a light scrub.  The starboard side is worst than the port - sunlight hits more over there as we anchor facing east most of the time.

Finally he checked our anchor set.  Whew!  I only played plongee assistant, handing him parts and tools from the boat and it wore me out.  I had to take a late afternoon cat nap in the cockpit.

But no rest for Tom.  He put another coat of Cetol on the companionway wood.  It cleaned up so nice that it actually looks like he put new wood there.  No way Tom was rolling unto Falmouth Harbor and Classic Week with tired looking teak trim.