May 24 through May 31

I'm going to depart from my usual day by day log and lump a week together.  For the most part, the week has consisted of working on the boat.  On Wednesday, the 24th, Barb departed for Houston for ten days to visit her son and our friends there.  Her trip was uneventful, as all airplane trips should be.

I have been working on boat stuff.  Amongst the jobs done was, compound and wax the hull and topsides.  The topsides were compounded and waxed three years ago, and the hull hadn't been waxed since I got the boat over seven years ago.  We hope to avoid getting the ICW mustache this year if we have fresh wax on it.  This was one job I  paid somebody else to do.  Wipeout Yacht Services, had three guys work on it for two days and it looks much nicer now.  It wasn't cheap, but I would have taken four times as long and been wiped out if I tried to do it myself.

I have replaced the gaskets in almost all the ports to solve the few leaks we had.  None of the ports leaked badly, but when making an ugly crossing like we did getting here, even the little bitty leaks add up and get things wet inside.  Before Barb left, we blasted each port with the hose to see which had even the slightest leak.  I replaced the gaskets in all that even dripped.  The hard part of replacing these gaskets was scraping out the old glue to make a clean surface to glue in the new gasket.  Then dealing with the glue to put in the new ones was a challenge, resulting in a lot of glue on my fingers.

The wind generator is rebuilt.  The new blades are balanced better than I ever did the old ones, I think, because I had a better place to balance them inside on a level surface with no breeze.  I replaced the bearings which probably wore out prematurely because the blades weren't balanced perfectly before.

The solar panels have the mounting brackets on, and I need to get the stainless tubing built to mount them on the boat.  This has been more of a challenge than I anticipated.  One of the other tasks I hoped to do here was repair the bend in my davits that happened last summer in NY.  I went to the local boat yard and asked them if they had somebody who could weld stainless on the boat to replace the piece that bent.  They gave me a name, which I called, but he is booked six weeks out.  He was the only guy in town who the yard would trust with what I need to do, and after chatting with him on the phone, we agreed that I would call him later in the summer, and set up a time when we can stop here on our way back south.  I still need the tubing bent for the solar panel mounts, and even that has been a challenge, because every place is closed for the Memorial day weekend.

I didn't accomplish much over the weekend, but come Tuesday, I got productive.  After six stops, I found a place that had the tubing I needed for the solar panels and they could bend it within the hour.  I devised a plan of how to attach the panels to the boat and found clamps to attach the tubing to a stanchion.  By evening, I had the panels hanging on the boat.  The basic design is that they are on a tube so they can be folded flat against the boat while not in use, and then folded up flat and swung out to the sides like wings to avoid any shadowing from the cockpit enclosure.

I put the dinghy back in the water and was delighted to see that after twenty-four hours, there was no water in it.  Leak solved!  We have decided that we carry too much stuff in the dinghy, so the plans are going to be revamped.  It's part of what you learn after a season of cruising.  We had a mushroom anchor, which is good for really anchoring, or a stern anchor when tying to a dock, but useless when beaching the dinghy and wanting to secure it.  So, we have added a four pound spade anchor.  We will carry both of them so we can use the spade on a beach, and the mushroom on the stern.  We had a plastic bag in the bow, in which we had the air pump, a safety kit which consisted of our expired flares from the big boat, a patch kit, the toolkit for the outboard, and two life vests.  The bag did not last because it was always getting stepped on.  We decided that everything except the life vests didn't have to be onboard all the time.  This will make it less crowded.  If I ever have to replace the dinghy, I will get one with a hard storage box in the bow.

GPS N 29-53.684 W 081-17.636  Nautical miles traveled today 0.  Total miles 4747.