Singapore Dry-dock
July to September, 2001

Jul 10              arrive Raffles Marina, Singapore
Jul 27        slip into dry-dock at ASL Shipyard, Jurong, Singapore
Aug 19     ship returns to water and moves back to Raffles Marina

 For a while our expedition was over.  We would spend the next two months focusing on the ship itself, our vehicle for exploration and our home.  Every couple of years the ship must come out of the water for a full examination and repair work on its hull.  The ship is ferrocement and for a very good reason.  This enables the crew of inexperienced but willing and able volunteers to carry out major repair work which involves first bashing holes in the hull with a jackhammer (a terrifying phase), then knitting together a frame of steel bar and wire mesh to fill the holes, ready for cement to be pushed through to seal the structure.  Itís a labor intensive process and during this dry-dock of just three weeks we not only replaced 200 square feet of our hull, but also installed new diesel filling systems, a brand new generator donated by the Gery-Heitz Foundation in LA, and rescued a very dilapidated shaft among many other tasks.  Dry-dock is an intense experience involving very physical work and very long days but there is no better way to learn your ship than to see its guts ripped out in a shipyard and to reconstruct from the inside.