Turds away!

When we brought the boat to the yard last month, we hauled
the portable pump-out from the neighboring boatyard (with permission) to the
slipway when we tied up.  Long walk and it was heavy.

We hooked everything up and pumped, pumped, till we realized the
dang thing was broke.  We hauled it all the way back to the neighboring boatyard, and hauled Journey with two full waste tanks.  Since then, Al has started to notice an odor emanating from the forward head.

Yep, we were starting to smell like shyte.  There’s only one way to fix that…. Pump. So we went over to examine the portable pump out again. Eureka, it had “stuff” in it! That meant that it had worked for someone else recently.
There was hope. So we pumped out the left over shyte into the shyte pipe in the ground and hauled the portable pump out over to the boat.

We hooked it up and pumped, pumped, till we realized that the dang thing was broke.  Great.

Then we remembered Messy Nessie.

Al built a pump out hose for us to use when we are offshore. Sorta looks like the Loch Ness Monster, hence the name. I’ll leave you to figure out how the Messy works into the equation. We hooked up Ms. Ness to the boat pipe and I placed the other business end into the hole in the portable pump out.

We pumped, pumped, and words cannot describe the stench that erupted from the confines of
that hose, but suffice to say, that effluent was transferred, Messy Nessie got a thorough washing out and we are empty, disinfected and smelling like mint, according to the label on the bottle of tank treatment. We emptied both tanks, then hauled the portable pump out back to the neighboring boatyard, and dropped the hose in the pipe and found it was still broke.

We left this recurrent theme for someone else to solve.

Xanthophobia

Definition

FEAR OF THE COLOR YELLOW: (xanthophobia, fear of the color
yellow, and fear of the word yellow)

1: fear of the color yellow: a persistent, abnormal, and
unwarranted fear of yellow, despite conscious understanding by the phobic
individual and reassurance by others that there is no danger. 2: fear of the
color yellow: an extreme unwarranted fear and/or physical aversion to yellow.

So if any of the above seems to describe you, you probably
will want to hit the “back” key right now.

You have stumbled into a yellow zone. 

Al and I had to replace the canvas on our last boat,
Journey. Not this boat, the other boat. I know, it’s confusing, but try to keep
up, will ya? Where was I? Oh yeah, Al was all for doing the normal thing, blue
or green, but I was holding out for… you guessed it, yellow.

Why, you ask? It’s different. I like different. I thrive on
different. I just needed to convince my husband to embrace his wild side.

I finally hooked him with the fact that bright yellow would
make us very visible. Visibility is good, I pointed out. He agreed, and
proceeded to pick out the loudest brightest gaudiest yellow in the Sunbrella
collection.

“Your Honor, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, one can only
look at the photographs of the wreckage to know that the defendant is lying
when he stated that he didn’t see my clients. No one could miss that much
yellow.”

And I do feel safe with a boat that emulates the lines down
the center of the highway.

Having a yellow boat has been a great icebreaker as well. People
flock to it like flies to honey, cameras in hand. Probably figure no one will
believe them. “No, really, it was the same color as Leroy’s school bus!”

And yes, she does get compliments. In fact, lots of them, so
either people respond favorably to yellow boats, or cruisers are just really
nice people. Well, they ARE really nice, but you know what I mean.

So yellow became OUR color. Our trademark, if you will. And
there was never any question that our new boat had to be yellow too.  People have been stopping their cars on the
little road for the last few days as the paint has finally been being put on
and saying how they love her color.

We do too. It’s such a fun color!

And on the 33rd day, there was light.

The last two days have been a whirlwind of activity here at the Boatyard. The Seller dropped by for two days to help Al with the inverter hookup. Boy was that a needed thing. Al and I: two people one would never want to see handling major electrical "stuff". Add to that all these new expensive parts.... We are very thankful for Bud coming to help with this phase. He is knowledgeable about electricity and this boat.

Al's homework for the first evening after Bud left was to butt splice all the inverter wires and shorepower "out system". The next day they started in again and hooked it up for the first time. It didn't work. All of Al's wires were removed as they tried to trace down the problem. A GFI in the boat had tripped off. They would get the power to switch through and then BAM out it went. They traced it to a starboard side only power issue and started checking all the outlets. I suggested that the GFI in the master head (bath) may have thrown itself off again, and it was the issue. It must have been stressed by the lightning strike, and now we need to replace it. Poor Al, he did a great job on the wires, twice!

So last evening, after thirty-three days in the yard, we could turn on a light          and it worked!

We have had visitors!!! Bob H., David and Margaret from  River Rats stopped by to see us while they were in Washington. They have been sworn to secrecy, so don't thing you will get a glimmer of info from them, you will have to wait....

But, there's good news on that front, as it looks as though we will be a sailboat again very soon!
The new topping lift is being made today, and weather permitting, we may get our mast back in tomorrow.
Stay tuned.. it's a boat, so I may be all wrong.

Wax on, wax off, oh bother!

I say all the time we only make each mistake once.
Of course, with a sailboat, there are unlimited mistakes that can be made, so by my calculations (and I'm probably mistaken) we will never run out of things to screw up.
We were deciding whether to polish after compounding the topsides. Now for a little explanation, compound is a grit that is put on the sides of the hull, then using a power buffer, it is taken off, leaving a nice shine. There is no wax involved here, just a buff to get the shine.
We had done this and the sides were looking good. We were told by yardguy to just wax, so we did a small section (4ftX4ft) to make up our minds. We couldn't see a bit of difference after buffing off the polish, so we got to thinking we might just do better to do as yardguy said and start waxing.
I grabbed the wax, thinking we should do the transom and see what it looked like.
Al buffed it off with a new pad on the polisher.
It looked GOOD.
"let's keep going"
Now I can't say which one of us said that, I don't remember. I know we both got caught up in the spur of the moment "Gee, this looks fantastic - can't wait to see it ALL nice and shiny" thing that we had going on right then. We were equally guilty of the "run with scissors" syndrome right about then. Don't think- just do.
After about twelve feet of oohs and aaahhs we had to stop and move the scaffold. That's when the stupid of what we had just done hit me.
Looking up at the area we had just applied wax to: the area that was now a source of pride cause it was soooo shiny and wonderful; looking at the area where we had to apply our vinyl name graphic.
This area HAD to be clean and free of dirt, oil, and wax.
Oops.
So know, dear readers, you will know why the extra step of using the de-waxer will be added to our work day tomorrow when we place, mark DE-WAX, then apply our name to our boat sides.

Al has a Holey Adventure Too!

We have a big hole in the bottom of the boat.

Al did it.

The new depth sounder has arrived and part of installing it
requires removing the old transducer that fits through the bottom of the boat.

Hence the hole.

First Al was concerned he wasn’t going to be able to get the
old transducer out.  The factory
installed it with 5200. That’s the super-duper PERMANENT adhesive everyone is
warned about. 

 ”Don’t use this if you
EVER want to remove it.”

Of course if he hadn’t been able to remove it, we would have
needed another hole in the bottom of the boat.

Now the idea with sail boaters is that one should keep the
number of holes under the waterline to a bare minimum. Some people have been
known to wash dishes in a bucket and forgo a real toilet so they could have NO
holes under the waterline. We aren’t going to go that far.

Besides, it’s too late for that. We already have 15 holes
under Journey’s waterline. That’s right, 15 separate places where water can
someday come rushing in to sink our boat. Why? Why not? I guess for those guys
building the boat, it’s an easy matter to grab a hole saw and pop out another
plug of fiberglass.

Then when the PO put in the dual air conditioners and genset
and refrigeration, well more holes.

I really didn’t want another hole.

So Al tried to remove the
dead transducer.

He pulled, he pushed, he twisted, he banged.

He managed to
tear the plastic housing to pieces.

He worked on it the daytime,

he worked on it when he woke in
the middle of the night.

He worked from the inside,

he worked from the outside.

He finally proclaimed, “It’s out!”

Then he proceeded to try and remove all the 5200 residue that
was left.

A couple days later, and he is busy making epoxy-covered
wood doughnuts for the new transducer to rest on, he is routing messenger lines
for the wire paths through the guts of the ship.

 I asked him what adhesive he
was going to use to bed it with and he replied 5200.

He figures if it took him four days to blast this thing out,
he will never have an issue with leaks.

Now I can rest easy, knowing I only have 14 holes that I
need to worry about.