It's a tough world at the moment

So I am supporting the economy.

I actually have way too many projects going on concurrently. The solar air vent is for the broken one you can see above the head but it doesn't quite fit. So in the meantime it sits above the dorade vent above the nav station where it fits perfectly.

I actually have 4 vents and I will see how well the solar vent works out before I commit to more of them. I also received some fuse mounts for the batteries and that needs to go to the top of my to do list.
I had a great day today. Last night in my heat induced stupor, I fired up the AC and had an excellent night's sleep as a result. Today was a balmy 90 degrees. Phew! What a difference a day makes. This morning I drove up to fast signs and picked up the boat signs. I asked Lonnie how I could remove the old sign adhesive and he showed me his secret weapon.......citric acid. He gave me a little amount and that stuff is incredible. Easy, peasey (how do you spell that?) to get the old stuff off. He also explained how to mount the new sign. It sounded simple enough but it was so windy when I came to do it that I messed it up. So the port side sign will have to wait for another day.

After Fastsigns I went to Sailor's Exchange and swapped an old coastal liferaft and a magma grill for 9 turnbuckles for my lifelines. I spent time cutting the lifeline to length getting ready for crimping.

I also stopped by Chuck's machine shop and paid $30 for my Swiss cheese winch supports.

My diet went south today. Lunchtime I grabbed a sub sandwich to go at a gas station and tonight I ate a 12" pizza. Mmmmmmmm!

Day 3

Today it was hot.

It sapped all my energy and needless to say I did not have a very productive day and spent most of it removing the adhesive residue from the old boat sign. The new sign is ready so I will go and pick it up tomorrow and hopefully install it.
 I also took apart the whale gusher manual bilge pump that does not work.

I took it out of a devilishly difficult place access wise, tested it and found out that it worked OK so I put it back in again and it still doesn't want to work. Never mind. It is not as if anyone is pushing me to do all this stuff.
While I was taking the whale gusher out, I had quite a serious accident. Now one of the terrible things about getting old is that you have to put up with wearing glasses. However there is one good thing that you get from all this inconvenience. When you are working underneath something like changing the oil in your car, then without glasses you get all this junk falling into your eyes. Wearing glasses protects your eyes. This afternoon though my glasses slipped at the most inopportune time and I got a big chunk of rusty metal in my right eye. Time to try out my new first aid kit.

Tomorrow I hope to install some new lifelines.
By the way, living at the marina is not for the faint of heart. The shower block is a sight worse than death and I sleep in my V-berth at the bow of the boat.

Day 2 of my vacation

Sounds great doesn't it? One would think of vacation time as swimming at the beach in the summer heat. Well  I have the summer heat alright and I am near the water however if you swam here you would probably catch typhoid or get bitten by a 2 headed water moccasin. So last night I went to take my nightly shower and there was a line a mile long so I went for a walk on the pier. Now this pier is LOOOONG! It goes out into a the St John's river for a good half mile and gosh it is beautiful to smell the cool air and look up at the stars. It reminds me why I am here. OK I have worked in the city doing my cubicle penance for 40 years and I do enjoy my job and my coworkers are nice and they are good to me....BUT......It is not what I would prefer to be doing and in just over a years time I get to go out on my wreck of a boat and enjoy what God has made for us. Speaking of which, I was visited last night my one of God's tiny creatures and had to resort to this  stuff.

Thank goodness for my new first aid kit.

First item on the agenda was removing my old winches and installing some self tailing winches. 

If you look closely you will see that the 5 mounting holes on the winch do not line up with the 6 on the old mounting plate so tomorrow I will have to pay a visit to the machine shop here at the marina.

So as usual, when you start one job, it morphs over into several others and I was looking for nuts and bolts to connect the winch to the plate. Now the previous owner bequeathed me a box of about 30 zip lock bags full of nuts and bolts. Trouble is you can never find anything.

So I bought a transparent box all full with compartments and sorted it all out.

I splashed out yesterday and bought a bag of ice so a lunchtime cold drink was heavenly. 

I do not have a refrigerator on board the boat but needless to say, I am a little tempted. 

I found an old medical kit on the boat and everything inside it was disgustingly mouldy except for the book which I will add to mine.

Next on the to do list was to replace the compass.

I bought it used and it has a big bubble at the top but at least you can see into it, not like the old one. I will have to check out how to get rid of the bubble.

Next I took of the old name "Endurance on the port side of the boat. The photo is upside down because I was hanging over the caprail while taking the shot.

I used a Stanley knife blade to start with and peeled the rest of it off. There is some adhesive residue left and it is not perfect but it should be OK. I pick up the new boat name from fast signs on Tuesday and fork over $120. I asked the painter here to give me an estimate to do my topsides and he quoted me $3800 for 3 coats of primer and 3 coats of AWL. Needless to say I was not impressed, and I guess he was too busy. They say that boating is like standing under the shower with a raincoat on, ripping up dollar bills. "Bottom Dave," the guy who prepares and paints your keel bottom quoted me $450 for 2 coats but I will wait until just before I launch her before I do that. Money, money money........

Spending another week at the boat

Road trips are pretty good in general but this one was not one of the best I have done. Most week day commuters are pretty good drivers and Florida must be a very safe place to drive because I saw lots of motorcycle riders without their helmets. I left work Friday afternoon and headed to my car which was loaded to the gunnels with stuff I had been collecting to take to the boat. I was a bit concerned leaving my car at the free car parking lots at the train station but I parked opposite the taxi stand and all was well when I picked it up. It took me 2 hours to drive the 50 rush hour miles out of town and it was hot as blazes because I didn't want to use the Air Conditioning, just in case the car overheated. Usually what I do is start driving, and when I feel tired, I pull over at a rest stop and sleep in the car. Well come 10 pm I started yawning a bit so I pulled over and grabbed my pillow for a kip. I fell asleep right away but a short time later I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. The problem was that the car was so full that I had no room to move the seat and that left me trying to sleep, bolt upright. I went on like this for several hours and finally around 3 am I had the bright idea of taking a lot of the stuff out of the back seat and placing it on the roof so that I could recline the seat back. So I did get 2 good hours of sleep. That was followed by a Cracker Barrel big breakfast and Coffee. Mmmmmmm! They pulled the boat out of storage and into the work yard for me and once on board I discovered some good news and some bad news.
Firstly the good news. Despite the warning labels saying that those foggers that I let off back in May, did not kill recluse spiders, I discovered about 20 dead carcasses scattered about the boat like this one.

Next to the bilge where horror of horrors, it was overflowing.

So all that work on trying to get rid of leaks was a total waste. It mightn't look like it but I must have dumped about 30 buckets of water out of that bilge. So back to the drawing board and I have my work cut out for me tracing leaks once more. I needed a simple project to start out and cheer me up so I took the LED lights and replaced out the incandescent ones left.

The red ones looked quite bright and in case you were wondering, they are red so that you can protect your night vision when needed. I have these in 3 places on the boat.
It was then that I need a nap in the V-berth because the humidity and heat had really got to me. I slept for about 5 minutes before waking to a loud noise and water on my face!

When I got up to take this photo it had stopped raining at my boat but was coming down in buckets, not 20 yards away from me. I had to do something about all this water, so I used my tried and true recipe for problem solving......go shopping. I headed off to Wally World and went up to a gum chewing teenager at the checkout and asked her in my very best English, where I could find a tarpaulin. This was followed by silence and a long "are you from outer space" stare. So then I asked her again.....Where can I find a tarp?......you know...T _ A _ R _ P. More silence and then she asked me what a tarp was. Grrrrrrr! So I explained as best I could what one looked like and finally Eureka, she said, "Oh you mean a tarp!" So I picked out a fancy brown one that was "heavy duty" and grabbed a bunch of other essential things that I had left at home, like a pen a paper (don't ask) and just as I was headed back I passed by that yummy Mexican place. Unfortunately being 5.30 pm it was packed, so I will take a rain check.

I actually did pretty well on dinner and afterwards I put the tarp up.

I need to be careful that I don't get too lavish, otherwise I will have to invite Kate and Willy around.

Egg timer for staying awake all night long and not being run over by the Queen Mary

I have a regular kitchen timer but I sleep the sleep of the dead and it's innocuous sound does me no good to turn off and turn over to go back to sleep. So I went on the hunt for a real noise shattering device and found this.

Now this thing doesn't look like much but boy oh boy, does it demand respect! It starts out with some minuscule beeps and ends up with an ear piercing squawk, so if you don't get to it quickly, you will be sorry. So I have been practicing and last Saturday I went through the entire night waking up every hour for a little bit and then going back to sleep. I need to get it down to 20 minute intervals so I have a ways to go but it looks possible. The idea is that ships take around 20 minutes going at 15 knots from below the horizon to get to you. I plan on having AIS too which should alert them to my presence, but I would rather be proactive. Actually, the whole idea of a disturbed sleep really irritates me. I love my sleep almost as much as I like to eat and with the possible combination of seasickness and sleep deprivation, you have to wonder why on earth anyone would choose to go sailing.

Fishing anyone?.................My first aid kit

I needed a first aid kit and looked all over for a ready made one and in the end decided to make my own. I went to the container store and looked at all the different types and ended up with a large plastic tackle box. I like that it is fairly water tight and being transparent, you can see at a glance that it is a first aid kit.

I guess everyone is different, so I tailored the contents to what my medical history has been. Tums, aspirin, throat lozenges, band aids, swimmer's ear, iodine, scissors, needle and thread, sun burn cream, thermometer, safety pins, Lidocaine, athlete's foot, ibuprofen, Tylenol, isopropyl alcohol, and bandages. I need to pick up some prescription medicine from the doctor including seasickness medication, and antibiotics. I will keep it around me and add to it as I see fit.

preparing to visit

Next week I am heading down to the boat to spend another week working on her. Even though I haven't been down there since May, I have not been idle. Besides collecting stuff I have finally got her documented after 4 months with the 7% Florida sales tax paid.

I have also been studying for my Ham exams in preparation for communicating on SSB High frequency radio for voice and email. I have passed my Technicians license and am at present studying for the very tough General class. My call sign is KK4RWL

I ordered an anchor light and tricolor from Bebi Electronics in Fiji and converted my Guest Masthead light over which also has a strobe light.

Also some special spider spray to hopefully kill all the recluse spiders on the boat.

I am hoping to replace my compass on the boat with this new one. The one on the boat doesn't work and you can't see through the glass.

Next is a marine outdoor speaker that has an ear piercing alarm on it that I plan on mounting to the mast near the spreaders.

Next a couple of self tailing winches.

And as well, a head sail, some sheets of lexan, coax cable, some rigging parts and lots more.

I'll have my work cut out for me when I get there, but this time I am not going to bust my gut trying to accomplish everything.