2. (JUST DISCOVERED! Ten year old pictures of the flood damage! See 6.1 through 6.7)
We started ripping out from the bow to the stern. This shows the galley half gone and what's left of the nav station. See the radar outboard of the computer monitor. Our only battery bank is on the floor under the chart table.
I've wanted to tell this story here, for some time. (10/4/3) See the dark stain on the wood just above the floor? Some of it is level, some is at an angle. The angle stain can be seen under the chart table. That was all caused by Hurricane Louise while stored on the hard at Crabbs Slipway in Antigua in 1995. It took two weeks to reach the yard via the phone system after the hurricane. When we inquired as to Epitome's condition, the lady said "Oh, no damage Mon". We partied late into the night and skipped our regular trip back to the boat because we were building a new home. In reality, Epitome' was blown on her side in her trench, filled up with over a thousand gallons of storm water and stayed that way for over ten months. All of our canned goods rusted and desolved and mixed with engine oil in the stingers that had entered there because of the factory wiring cutout under the engine. When I returned and found the flood I was stunned. It was clear the boat had rested on her side for MONTHS before being righted but was still not examined or pumped out. The mess took over a month to clean up. Many problems relating to this flooding continued to plague us in the following years. The boat yards explanation? They denied that any boat had even tipped over! Oh, one of the employees broke in and stole our entertainment center. (TV, stereo, speakers) I had my wife bring a new stereo from the states and (you guessed it) Customs seized it all. I was even on their register so they wouldn't but they didn't care. They were ransoming anything that came into their sad little country. Antigua is the only country we ever visited that would not recognized a yacht in transit. There are a lot more Antigua stories nearly as bad as these that happened to us before we could flee.