I’m a list maker, 100%. I love lists. I have lists of lists. Rob, not so much. But without a list, especially at this age, I believe nothing would ever get accomplished. So we have lists. And now let’s have a list retrospective. I don’t know when I made the “Boat Projects b4 June” list, but I suspect it was some cold rainy winter day when I was missing Yohelah and dreaming about getting her back in ship shape.
Now it’s mid-July, and we’re getting ready to take her and do some sailing. I am on permanent Work From Home duty, and she’s my home (in my heart way more than the house), so we’ll spend some time aboard while I work.
So let’s see how we did on that “get ready for sailing” list. A checkmark means we accomplished what we wanted, a star is partially done, and the big X means nothing happened. But, given that we had an implosion of caustic cleaner into our bilge and everything was interrupted by pulling and repainting two fuel tanks, I’ll take one check and three stars. The check was our biggest priority, so she’d not look awful when we moved to her new home at PYC, and that was accomplished through some very long days of scraping varnish and scrubbing everything (and Brittney going aloft, THANKS!).
Today, this is the current state of the boat. We had planned to catch a strong ebb tide at 9am and get to Port Townsend tonight and Friday Harbor or Shaw Island for a strong work cell signal on Sunday night. But the tanks are still a work in progress, so we’ll take off Monday night instead. This is the big item that didn’t make it on the list, but caused the delay on the rest of the items.
The hinges on the lazarette and AIS transmitter will wait until we come home. The watermaker will get some love once we’re anchored somewhere. We’ll “unpickle” it, turn it on, and use it this summer. But the plan is to pull it out and sell it this winter when we buy our generator. One thing we learned from other folks out cruising is that all this “super green” energy efficiency is BS when you just need some water. We’re going to install a generator on Yohelah and a super inefficient but high volume watermaker. When we want to make water we turn on the generator and have 30 gph instead of 13 on a good day with our Spectra. It’ll burn some fossil fuel, but not much, and the generator will be well insulated and barely noticeable (especially from the hammock on the bow).
Here’s the cup holder in Rob’s shop, ready for install on the boat. It’s been designed and built to withstand anyone crashing into it, or grabbing it for stability when a wave rolls the boat. It’s also designed to hold stemless wine glasses or a wine bottle in each hole. And the little slot in the back is the perfect place to drop your cell phone while you’re at the helm or sitting in the cockpit.
There are five new faucets in boxes in the aft cabin. This will be a project while we’re on anchor. The three in the galley require someone lays on their back wadded up between the fridge and the sink, inside the cupboard under the sink where the recycle lives. I’m actually going to volunteer for this task since Rob did it last time. Only problem is the main faucet has been on for 15 years and the other two are original, so the amount of “frozen” in the nuts holding them on is going to be bad, and my hands are just not very strong. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully we’ll come home with all five new and shiny.
This is the drawing of the new sewage tank Rob wants to put in our bow. Before we ordered a very expensive tank, he wanted to make sure it would fit where we want it to live. So he built a plywood mockup from this drawing.
This is the mockup in the bow. I have to say, with my spacial challenges, my interpretation of those drawings would look Nothing like this! But he confirmed with the sales folks at Marine Sanitation this is right, so we’re good. The space in the bow is hard to get to, and we learned our lesson last time about folding bikes rusting into a big blob up there, so we’re going to repurpose it for a new holding tank. Once he fitted the mockup we went into the city to confirm and order and found out, of course, that just like house remodels during covid, boat owners are super busy with remodels and we’re backordered 6 weeks on our new tank.
So there we are. Seven items, one done, three partial and three deferred. But there was one HUGE item that never made it to the list and it’ll be done tomorrow. That’s ok, I have another list to keep track of this list.
