The patches are hatches

On Friday the weather was cool-spring-sunny and nearly perfect (in the heart of winter) so three of the plywood patches got replaced with hatches. By the time the last screw went home on the aft starboard side the rain was getting too close to risk pulling the patch over the V-berth. By the way, if one is daft enough to use duct tape to help seal temporary (4+ month!) holes in one's boat - a heat gun and 3M Adhesive Remover will become two of one's very best friends. Trust me on this, duct tape should be used to tape ducts. It should never, ever, be found stuck to sailboat decks.

But I digress. With rain overhead it seemed a good idea to move the base of repair efforts back inside the boat and finish up installing the trim around the inside of the aft hatches. Well, almost finish. A lack of proper sized screwage left the screens to go on at a later date. It rained a good part of the night and all of Saturday. The 3 installed hatches passed their first leak check with flying colors...making yours truly a happy deck monkey indeed.

I had to leave the lake Saturday night, chaffing at yet another job being almost done. Rats! But Sunday dawned as another near perfect day in the mid-west, so Deb rolled out some butyl tape of her own and set the last hatch in place. All of our patches have been replaced by hatches and Kintala no longer looks like some beater sitting up on blocks out in the weeds. (Of course she doesn't actually run yet but we will keep that just between us IF you don't mind.)

The reason for my early departure from the lake was that Sunday morning found us wheels-up for a set of flights what would land us in Ft. Lauderdale for a couple of days. Not bad sometimes, this job of mine. Even better we did the flight in a demo bird with the hopes that the Company would see fit to replace our tired, somewhat beat (but perfectly maintained) ride with something a little better suited for the job. Having the luxury of sitting in south FL the demo crew allowed my partner and I to run through some of the systems; whereas the APU immediately shot craps, an "APU FAULT" message popped up on the EICAS, and all such running-through came to a sudden and unexpected halt. In other words I broke their shiny new jet in less than 5 minutes.

Sorry.

And no, I can't buy it...not even with a hundred lifetimes of airplane driver pay.

I'm told it will be all fixed before the folks that can buy it need a ride home. In the meantime I'll sit in Florida and enjoy the pictures of Kintala sporting her own shinny new bits.