Can someone tell us where all the fluff and dust comes from? Temptress has a wooden sole, a couple of rugs covering most of it. Just two people live on board who remove shoreside shoes before descending below and the boat is regularly vacuumed, dusted or brushed. Yet every time you lift a sole board there the stuff is lying in grey black piles made sticky by the salty atmosphere.
From time to time we have to lift and wipe the board edges, scrapping out the fluff from the supporting struts with a screw driver or similar. The catches slotted into each board are usually cruded shut and require the attention of a wooden spoon handle and a screw driver to work them loose once more. Under sole the tops of the water tanks and the bilge spaces are usually dry but inevitably grubby – just how does hair and sand work its way down here to gather in random balls?
Having recently washed down the saloon and galley wood work as well as some of the darker recesses like the cavernous dry locker (home to cereals, flour pulses and pasta supplies) and the space under the galley sink (home to everything from potatoes and cleaning materials to charcoal for the incense burner) our attention has turned to this murky underworld. Bit by bit each time we have cause to venture into part of it we have started to clean the nooks and crannies, rinsing the dirt from the storage boxes that hold tinned supplies, wine, emergency bottles of water, spare dusters and the like. But it is a thankless task as, leave it a few weeks and the fluff and dust will return, oddly damp and sticky clinging to every surface.