Half a cruiser

It has been said that cruising is the art of doing endless boat maintenance while anchored in exotic places. We have the endless boat maintenance part down pat, so I guess that makes us half a cruiser. Then again; if one was born and raised in Tahiti maybe one would think a lake manufactured in the middle of the corn fields of Illinois and filled up with sailboats as an exotic place? Or maybe I can call the pump out dock an exotic port of call? There has to be one like it in Tahiti someplace, doesn't there?

Naw...half a cruiser it is.

It is a malady affecting many at our marina lately. Friend Joel's boat suffered some sort of major melt down. When I stopped by his slip to invite him to dinner he was elbow deep in the engine compartment with motor bits, wrenches, and screwdrivers scattered hither and yon. Over on S/V Gail Force Jeff was laboring to re-bed one of the big side windows of his Hunter. It seems the leading edge has spronged its way free of the sealer holding it in place to funnel as much spray as possible into the interior. Ray is hoping to finish up installing a binnacle, the last task of many this year, and get his boat wet in the next couple of weeks. It may take a sailor to get a boat across an ocean, but it takes a mechanic to get the damned thing off the dock.

Meanwhile, I am struggling to keep S/V Kintala on the "working boat" list and off the "project boat" list. (Is there something like the 90-day injured reserved list in the sailboat world? If not, there should be.) Three days of hatch work resulted in one hatch that leaked just a little less than it did, and one hatch running water through it like I'd hooked up a faucet. We know this because the last mounting screw was being torqued up just as thunder rolled across the lake. The rains came, the rains conquered. Apparently the work done re-bedding the hatch frame disturbed the half-arsed repair work done on bedding the hatch glass done in the dark, distant past by persons unknown. The hatch top is now sitting in the garage and Kintala has a sheet of plastic duct-taped over a giant hole in her deck. I am seriously considering pulling all of the hatches, having them cleaned and powder coated, re-installing the glass (in a non-half-arsed manor) and re-bedding them a second time. Your guess would be as good as mine as to this happening before or after removing and replacing the head and all the associated hoses. (A job that has not even been started yet and is already a morphing into a monster headache.) At the moment the planning node of my brain has hit overload and quit working.