This time of year tends to get busy with family and all sorts of things going on. Most important of all, we recently hit a major milestone in our lives. Cheri has retired, ending a twenty year career as a Project Manager with the Federal government. Woohoooo! Congratulations Baby! This also marks a point on our calendar where we have just three months to go before throwing off the dock lines and heading south. I can't believe we've come this far. The last five years has flown by so quickly. It had better slow down now so we can savor some of that time we have ahead of us.
I did manage to make some progress on several of our projects and others....not so much. The most time consuming of them all, varnishing the teak, has come to a halt because of the cold weather. I had originally thought I could crank this one out in about four weekends. Over the duration of the project I lost track of just how long I had actually been working on it and recently realized that it's been since late October, about ten weeks. Yikes! Of course most of that time was lost due to weather or traveling (or procrastination) or whatever but the really significant thing about this is that I left all that blue tape on there. They say you're only supposed to leave it on for a few days at most because it gets really tough to remove after a while. It's now been somewhat more than a while and guess what? It's true. That blue tape is a bear to remove. I got out there this weekend and started peeling it off, very slowly, with a single edged razor blade to encourage the sections that didn't want to come up on their own. That's right! Give me a blade and my dark side comes out. This took hours with very little progress. Then it rained for two days. After the rain stopped I went back out and found that the tape came up much easier. OK, thanks for that. Somebody is looking out for me, fer sure.
Some other things went a little easier. I replaced the life lines (hand rail) this weekend. The old ones were covered in white vinyl or PVC or something and had developed rust stains. When I removed the stanchions for cleaning and re-bedding I took the old lines down to West Marine in Annapolis and placed an order for all new lines in bare stainless wire with all new fittings. We're only running the wire lines from the bow back to the gates on each side and will use 1" stainless tube from there back around the cockpit. Mounting the new lines was pretty painless I also added two stanchion mounts on the port side up by the bow for a whisker pole.
I have the parts for building the cabinet in the aft cabin and once this is finished I can get started on the water maker. I also have all the parts needed to install a single side-band (SSB) radio. Time for a priority list. I reasoned that the radio installation should come first because with that completed Cheri can spend some time getting familiar with it while I build the cabinet and install the water maker. Good plan. I had a four day weekend and figured this would be plenty of time. Best laid plans and all that.
The bigger part of the SSB installation was mounting the transceiver and running the wires. The transceiver weighs about ten pounds and the manual makes a big deal about not hanging it from overhead and being sure to secure it firmly to a flat horizontal surface. It's dimensions are 11.5" x 11.5" x 4.75" so it's not so much huge as it is dense. If this baby broke loose it would do some damage. It also draws 25 amps so it must produce some pretty good heat. I spent some time trying to find a good location for this thing. I originally had wanted to mount it under the Nav Station desk but that would create a conflict with your legs when you sit down plus it would require a hefty shelf to mount it on. I ended up taking over the cabinet just forward of the Nav Station. It has a louvered door so hopefully it'll have sufficient ventilation. We had been using this as a catch-all for CD's and DVD's and pretty much anything having to do with a computer. Everything was just piled up in there and the space was poorly used. I decided I could build a shelf to support the "stuff" and mount the transceiver and the modem underneath. The cabinet is 15" deep and the shelf is only 12" deep with a gap in front and back so there should be good enough air flow. And yes, I added fiddles to both the front and the back of the shelf.There are a number of cable connections to this thing. The control head and speaker each have one. The modem has another. There's also a port for connecting GPS. On the back there's three cables that run to the back of the boat and connect to the antenna tuner which then connects to one of the back-stays. This has already been set up with insulators at the top and bottom to be used as the SSB antenna. One of the cables goes to a separate antenna for DSC (click here for more info). Running these three cables turned out to be a major pain in the tukhus (click here for more info). They come with connectors mounted at both ends and the two antenna cable connectors are pretty bulky. This makes pulling them through tight spots difficult at best. If the factory would install a connector at one end and provide a kit for the other it would make life soooooo much easier. I first tried pulling all three cables down the starboard side cable-run that goes behind the cabinets in the galley and dumps out in the cockpit locker. This was my number one choice because it's the most direct path and the main antenna cable is big and stiff and only 33' long. I spent the better part of a day trying to get the cables pulled through this location but in the end had to run them under the cabin sole, beneath the galley and then out through the genset compartment. I've only gotten them halfway through so far so I have at least a few more hours of work ahead of me. Even going this way is a tight squeeze and I'm beginning to see that this boat has way too many wires and hoses running down one side. No wonder she leans to starboard 2 degrees! Gonna hafta move all my future projects over to the port side.
While I was working on the physical installation Cheri has been installing the software to run the modem. This will allow us to send and receive e-mail by radio and pick up weather reports from NOAA. The biggest complication so far has been because we have Mac computers and the software is only made for PC's. She had to install Windows 8 to work with the e-mail program and the modem. Dang! We tried so hard but there's just no getting away from Microsoft. We'll see how it all works out when I get the radio up and running.
Right now the plan is to complete this installation next weekend. I'll do a complete write-up and add some pictures then.
Since we've been talking about time I'll just point out here that I have 65 days, 6 hours and 45 minutes to go until my last day of work. Two more weeks beyond that is our scheduled cast off time.
1 comment:
Wow, congrats to Cheri! Finally here! You guys have done such a great job of learning the boat and prepping for cast off time. I hope everything continues to come together so you can leave as planned.
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