Two Steps Forward....

This past weekend we reached a milestone in our plans to live aboard.  Please note that I said "reached", not "passed" a milestone (is passing a milestone like passing a kidneystone?).  After being on the market for only 3 weeks we received a full price offer on the house.  Needless to say, we jumped on it.  It took us about 30 nanoseconds to discuss the downsides of this offer before signing the contract and pouring the champaign.  Actually, we didn't pour any champaign because neither of us really like the stuff, but more importantly, we don't want to jinx this thing before it's all finalized.  The home inspection was on Saturday and the appraisal will be next Thursday.  If we can get past that then we're doing pretty good.  We're saying our prayers that this will go smoothly and work out well for all concerned.  We signed the contract Thursday evening and then headed down to the boat, getting in around 1AM.  Why do we keep getting there so late?  Whatsamatta with us?

Friday morning Cheri took on the job of washing down the topsides and then scrubbing all the gloss gelcoat with a white pad and Scrubbing Bubbles.  There's a lot of surface area from the deck up and a good portion of it is gloss.  She was really feeling it in her arms by the time she was finished with this job.  La Vida Dulce is starting to look pretty sweet.

Her next project was to make a template of the cabin sole (that's lardy-dar speak for floor) so we can get a price on wall-to-wall carpet.  A few weeks back we nearly froze to death in spite of our cool-man oil filled space heater.  We became very aware of how cold the sole can feel in bare feet so we made the decision to put in carpet.  This was actually suggested to us last Fall by Sharon Malatich, yacht broker extraordinaire at Gratitude Yachts.  If the wall-to-wall stuff is too pricey then we'll put in area rugs.  Either way it's gonna be an improvement.  The template she made is from heavy brown construction paper that we had from a previous project.  She cut up pieces to match the oddball shape of the sole and then taped them together to make two sections, one for the Main Salon and the other for the forward stateroom.  That doesn't really account for much floor space so hopefully it won't cost too much.  If we have them made we'll have the edges bound all around to give it a finished look.

While Cheri was working on scrubbing the topsides I concentrated on placing two antennas, cell phone and Wi-Fi, at the top of the mast.  There's not much room up there to start with and the specs call for having antennas 3' apart.  That's not gonna happen!  There's already a VHF antenna mounted up there, centered on the port side of the mast, pretty much hogging all the space on that side.  This left me with mounting spots on the starboard side.  The mast is something like 55' long and it's laying on it's side across 4 saw horses.  There are 2 sets of spreaders sticking out from the sides at approximately 1/3 and 2/3 the way up.  The spreaders are positioned in such a way that they prevent the mast from being rolled side to side and of course the side I wanted to work on was facing down towards the grass.  I had to drill a 1/2" hole for cables to run through and then drill and tap 8 holes to mount the brackets.  I had to pull the top off the mast and then remove the sheeves (pulleys) for the lines that hoist the sails.  Inside the mast are two conduits.  One runs half way up to the lights mounted at the spreaders, the other conduit goes full length to the top and runs the wires for wind speed and direction sensors, VHF radio antenna and now cell phone and Wi-Fi.  I'll probably decide to mount a TV antenna up there some day too.  For now that skinny little 3/4" conduit is getting pretty full.  Island Packet ran a length of braided twine through there to be used for pulling wires.  What a great idea!  Of course I didn't see it beforehand and managed to pull it down into the mast where it bunched up into a knot about 2/3 of the way down.  Great.  Now I've got a real problem.  I spent all day trying to pull 2 cables through there, got one through and finally gave up.  I have everything mounted and ready to go except for the cable for the cell phone.  I don't want to leave things as they are because some day I'm gonna want to run more wire through there and I'm gonna get really upset with the creep who made this mess.  I think my only option now is to remove all the wire from the conduit, clear the snag, and then re-run all the wire again.  That means all new connectors.  Might as well put in new wire since that's all ten years old and has been exposed to salt water all that time.  This project certainly snowballed.  I'll hafta continue on it next weekend.  That is, IF the yard isn't waiting to step the mast.  They have two others to do and want to do them all at the same time.  I feel like I'm inna bind.  Am I the only one who has projects get outa hand like this?

Saturday I spent all day washing and scrubbing the hull, same job that Cheri did on the deck the day before.  My new friend Mac told me we needed to get this done so the yard can get to work on compounding the hull.  About 1/3 of the way down the port side a guy stopped by to talk.  He asked me what I was doing with the white pads so I told him this was to knock down some of the oxidation prior to compounding.  He stood back and looked real long and hard at it.  I stood back and looked at it too.  Neither of us could see any difference between what had been gone over with the white pads and what hadn't.  Dude just shook his head and walked away.  Afterwards it dawned on me that maybe that wasn't the purpose of the white pads at all.  Maybe they were just supposed to clean away all the wax to give a good clean surface for compounding.  Yeah, that's it!  I went ahead and finished up.  This boat stuff is a daily learning experience, I'll tell ya.

I learned one really important lesson this weekend: boat people really like to talk.  I'd be scrubbing away on the hull and one after another, folks would walk up and start talking.  Pretty soon you know their life history, their hopes and dreams, how many boats they've owned, where they've sailed, how many times they've run aground.  Usually after about 5 minutes of conversation they'll get into their opinion about a better way to do what you're doing.  One guy actually called me an idiot for the way I sanded the hull the week before.  Of course, he owns a big humongous, gas guzzling, twin engine cabin cruiser so I guess it takes one to know one.

I did meet some really great people.  One couple had just bought a 1983 Bristol with a dark blue hull and it was, forgive me, in bristol condition.  Every time I walked past we talked (that's right, I'm one of those boat people) about our boats but mostly about how beautiful this Bristol was.  Another nice guy I talked to was a professor from Pennsylvania.  We chatted quite a while about fixing up boats and how you end up spending as much on a cheap, used one as you do on a newer, more expensive one.  This was his theory but I believe it's probably true.

I met some real goons too.  We're plugged into a 15 amp 110VAC circuit and use that for our lights, our cool-man oil filled heater, to charge the batteries, to run any power tools, pretty much everything.  Last weekend we lost power so I went over to the box to reset the breaker, figuring we were pretty much maxed out.  I discovered that someone had plugged in to the same outlet even though there were others available.  I went over and asked the guy if he'd mind if I switched him to another outlet and he gave me a lecture on running the proper sized power cord.  Even asked me how much current I was drawing.  I don't know!  Too much is my guess.  He said he wasn't even running anything yet and how could his stuff trip the circuit?  When I went to reset the breaker I found that the GFCI had tripped.  After I moved his cord to another outlet I didn't have any more problems the rest of the weekend.  I think his extension cord was bad.

So, this weekend we didn't get as much done on the boat as I had hoped but on the other hand we might have sold the house.  When we came home Saturday night we had a message on the phone from a guy who wanted to buy Cheri's motorcycle.  This was just icing on the cake.  Things are definitely moving ahead with our long term plans.  Now we just need to make some progress on the boat.  Still shootin' for a launch date at the end of April.