Christmas in Florida

Hi Everyone,

Its in the 70's here and cloudy . It sure doesn't feel like Christmas. As there is nothing open or happening here, we are going to take a drive to the beach. How kwel is that! No snow !!!!!!! And we thank God for all the blessings in our life. So far all the projects on the boat are taking a little longer then we thought they would. My new phrase is "Nothing is ever easy, one step forward, three steps back!" We finally got the name and our hailing port on the boat the other day. Had to put it on while bobbing up and down in the dingy with Kathy holding on to the painter through a port hole so I wouldn't float away. Good thing everything went smooth because if I took any steps backwards, I would've been swimming with the manatees.

We do want to wish all of our friends and family following this blog a "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."

Fall colours!

Hello all,

The other day I was coming back from buying stuff and upon entering the boat I forgot a cardnal rule. "One hand for yourself, one hand for the boat." So, as I started down into the boat, my foot slipped off the step. My decent was starting out to be considerably faster than I wanted. First, my butt hit the top step, my leg hit.....something and my elbow hit another step. All this somewhere around, oh say, a million miles an hour. Next thing I know I'm at the bottom of the steps on the sole, (floor) a HUGE, HUGE charley horse in my top left butt cheek, my left shin burning like the dickens and my elbow tingling like there is no tomorrow. And as you can see, the picture doesn't do the real thing justice. AND I'm not I'm not going to show you a picture of the bruise on my boo boo. But I will heal. And as painful as all that was, the damage to the can of mineral spirits was nearly fatal and has no chance of healing.



The galley is coming along. The new stove is in and working and the new corian counter tops are almost completly installed. I figure that as I was redoing it I would do it all. I took out all the old dark wood in the dishes cabinet and redid it with white formica and the dish rack with a type of plastic that they call expanded foam. (the name starts with a K but I forget.) It cuts like butter, glues sweet, can sand it, use screws on it and paint it. Its great stuff. When its finished, I'll take pictures and post it. There is a dirth of projects to complete before we are off but hopefully the important ones will be done in a couple of months and we can be off.

Getting Wet

One step forward

We are continuing getting the boat ready for sailing. We didn't realize how big this boat was until we viewed it in the lift being moved into position to put it into the water. The yard workers set her into the water as gentle as a feather. After getting her into the water and still in the slings, we started looking into making sure that none of the wet stuff on the outside was getting inside. I had checked all the seacocks that I had replaced or worked on, 3 times. As I looked into the kitchen through the top hatch I noticed that the floor was covered in about an inch of water. It was then and there that I discovered that the one and only seacock that I didn't check was the one I didn't work on. Ahhhh, "Danger, danger Will Robertson", wet stuff inside! After closing the sink through hull, the bilge pumps took care of the little water that had made it inside. We continued checking the bilge every half hour for incoming water. None was found. That night on the boat I had a hard time sleeping, I kept checking the bilge for water every hour. Warren slept like a log going out to sea.
Now we have to do a few things to get the engine going. I hope we get to take a few steps forward and none back. So far when we work on something we find two more things we have to do before the project is done.