Prep for Departure

22 -28 Feb. 2018

It always takes a while for us to get settled back on the boat, but this one was pretty quick because we had people coming to the boat right away.

The new dive guy came on Friday. From the sound of it it was a much easier job than last time. Chad put the 3rd coat of Cetol on the wood around the cockpit.

On Sunday I started emptying out back cabin, originally to find the new oil change pump. Some idiot had put it in the corner farthest from the door, behind a ton of stuff. Chad came for the 4th and final coat of Cetol, which I manage to put a thumbprint in, and Heather an arm. It still looked better. Heather cleaned and dried the the bimini canvas, along with the hatch and binnacle covers, all while being swarmed by those nasty biting flies. She's tough.

On Monday it was pretty rainy so I repacked the back cabin after organizing and thinning out some. Think of a regular closet. Now knock the closet over on its door side and move the access to what was the ceiling. The rule of thumb on a boat is that you have to move at least three things to get what you want. For the pump it was more like 30.

On Tuesday we removed the dinghy from the forward deck and Chad came back to remove the last of the blue masking  tape. He gave the boat one last wash. Except for the aft half of the toe rail the boat probably looked the best it had since we bought her.

Wednesday we treated the canvas with 303, lubed the miles of zippers, then installed both segments of the bimini. Then we loaded the outboard on the dinghy. The one pound tank was disintegrating from corrosion, but I was able to install the hose and 10# tank. After a couple dozen pulls it actually started up. This was a gift because we really didn't lay it up last summer when we arrived in Brunswick last summer and it hadn't run since.

We wanted to leave by end of month because we had a plan to have Heather's niece in the Bahamas in April. Because of upcoming weather (gusts to 25mph) we weren't leaving just yet, and we still had quite a bit of stuff to do.

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