The List and The Pile

While Tim works away at fixing things and making money for the privilege, I've been working away at fixing things and trying not to spend too much of the money he's been working so hard to make. My list of 34 items (still being added to by the way) has six nice check marks on it, all for just one week so I'm feeling pretty good. And this not even including the first two days that I spent trying to finish my taxes which hardly count as a boat project.

After the taxes were finished, I started out with a pretty easy day of small projects - removing the solar cockpit rope light (which was starting to act wonky and getting sticky) and replacing it with four new Luci Lights, installing a switch protector on the solar master switch in the aft cabin which somehow a jacket kept finding and turning off), re-routing our power cord so as not to trip up the 80's+ gentleman trying to get on to the neighbor boat, and fabricating a shelf support for the middle of our electronics shelf which somehow always gets overloaded and was starting to sag.

Day two of boat projects was supposed to be a very easy day of sewing. For those of you who don't own boats, you never, ever say Easy and Boat Project in the same sentence. It's guaranteed to jinx it. The chafe guards I wanted to make were easy as projected - rectangles of the awesome (did I say awesome?) boat blanket material that Sailrite sells with a strip of Velcro down one side. You only need the hook side of the Velcro because it sticks right to the boat blanket. Now we have chafe guards that can be installed after the lines are secure instead of trying to feed the lines through the vinyl tubing we were using before. The vinyl tubing slid down the lines, but the new boat blanket ones cling to the lines, can wrap around two lines together, and the fabric breathes, keeping the lines from getting moldy. I loves me some boat blanket.

The next project was supposed to be a very simple cover for the windlass to keep the rain from filling up our bilge. The windlass has a decent hole where the chain goes through the deck and the water just pours down there when it rains. I fashioned a bonnet of sorts out of a scrap of leftover Sunbrella, with space for the anchor chain and tie-down rope to pass through. It was very much like Tim's job - up to check the fit, down to sew the fit, up to check the fit, down to fix the fit, etc. etc. In spite of the extra time it took to fit, all in all I was pretty happy with it, except for the fact that the base of the windlass is only about 1/2" plate and it's not really high enough to grab the elasticized edge of the bonnet. This means that the hole is only partially covered if the bottom edge slips off the base. Can't much be done, so it is what it is.

The day finished out with a repair to our dinghy deck storage bag. Once the dinghy is folded up and wrapped up in the cover, there are two elastic cords that drawstring the ends shut tight. The elastic cord had rotted, like all elastic does in the tropics, and needed to be re-strung.

This is only half of the pile

Day Three found me in the bilge. We've talked about moving the fridge drain into the shower sump box in an attempt to get the bilge dry. This discussion has involved looking at options for adding one of the enclosed shower sump boxes instead of the open top one that we have (that smells funky). Since we are installing a new bilge pump and moving the old one into a secondary position, we're still not sure how the whole arrangement is going to look yet. As a temporary solution, I ran the fridge drain into the existing sump box with the addition of a plastic thru-hull into the box. Works great, so at least that water will be out of the bilge until we decide how to route the other hoses and pumps.

Next week will almost certainly be mostly in the bilge with a short break to install a '12V cigarette outlet in the cockpit for the new iPad mount that's coming later in the summer. If Tim is the Worker Man then I guess that only leaves Powder Puff for me...

Now where's that new set of flex-head wrenches I bought??