Our Mold Hell By MichaelSAVUSAVU, FIJI

So check out this dorade vent,
shiny white before we left.
Out in the sun the whole time.

Last year we flew back to the States and left Del Viento afloat in Tonga, for 3 months. When we returned, she looked surprisingly similar to how we'd left her. That experience set our expectations for our recent return to Del Viento in Fiji, after what turned into an 8-month absence. Disappointment is a product of expectations. We arrived back to Del Viento disappointed.

We shouldn't have been, we should have known better.

Things turned out so well in Tonga that we got complacent. We didn't have a regular minder this time, to open the boat weekly and check on the batteries. We smugly assumed we'd left a leak-free boat behind. We hadn't. That latter fact made all the difference in the world.

Photos tell the story best, so I'll use them to do so.

The silver lining is that we had a great dinner ashore the other night with Meri, Jim, and Carolyne of Hotspur. (They're housesitting in a hillside home with a million-dollar view and a killer porch to enjoy it from. All isn't roses with regard to that situation, but the downsides only add fuel to the great stories Meri has to share.) Well, the silver lining I'm talking about isn't the dinner, but the story idea that came out of our mold hell. Meri and I are going to co-write a magazine article about it.

--MR

So check this out, upon dinghying up to the boat for the first time,
I saw these blisters--never had them before--all over the hull. I
know our gelcoat is shot and we've plans to paint, someday, but
above-the-waterline blisters is something I don't want to deal with.
Turns out they are all spider webs, and I had to touch one before
I was sure, bullet dodged!

This looks bad, but cleans up super easily, it's already done.
This ain't mold hell, just what we expected.

The start of mold hell. The cushion that sat here, beneath a drip,
we didn't know about, is in awful shape.

Frances cleaning out the fridge. Interestingly, there was
no mold in there--we'd cleaned it thoroughly before leaving
and we'd left the hatch propped open. Yet it obviously served
as a cockroach meeting place because there were dead bodies
in there and it was streaked with crap. Ugh.

So the Force 10 stove grate is rusting away and this teapot
kind of highlights the general state of things. 

This is the depth of mold hell. These painted fiberglass surfaces were shiny
white when we left. I sanded and painted them all with Interlux one-part
polyurethane in 2015. They were gorgeous. It's a hard shiny surface
on which I would not have expected mold. And there is not a speck of mold in those books
below. Doesn't jive. I'd have thought it easy to clean mold from these hard, shiny surfaces.
It's not. Vinegar and hydrogen peroxide and scrubbing failed. Then, literally minutes
after handing this blog post over to Windy to review, I tried a Kiwi solution
I bought in town, Exit Mould. It's a miracle product.

But really, This is the view ashore. This is where we get to clean
mold. We returned to a boat still afloat. I'm not complaining.