Cold turkey

Some of the wiring at Kintala's nav station is, shall we say, not up to spec. Truth be known, most of the wiring throughout Kintala is not up to spec, but most of it works. The old saying, “If it works, don't fix it” is particularly applicable when there are plenty of things around that are not working. One bit of wire, that which supplied the power (or maybe the ground) to the GPSmap176, has always been a bit wonky and, a day or so ago, went from wonk to full failure.

The GPSmap176 is a decrepit, ancient bit of antique hardware. Its only purpose in life is to provide position information to the GX2150 VHF radio so the IAS receiver will work. A task for which it is totally capable, as long as it has power and a ground. Alas, the wiring is sealed into the plug at the back of the unit and beyond the realm of fixing. A replacement harness needed to be sourced. Fortunately Kintala's crew includes one if the premier parts hunters on the planet. The needed bit was found somewhere in the deep, dark reaches of the warehouse of Internet and shipped off.

The original harness was made of thin, easily damaged wire that resembled human hair. The new harness is even thinner. Cutting out the old and splicing in the new was a challenge for 60 year old eyes; the task completed mostly by feel. Soldered, reinforced with multiple layers of heat shrink, carefully tied and stowed, it should survive the relatively benign environment of the nav station. It is curious that the harness is so delicate. Is there really an engineer somewhere who thinks Kintala will be faster because he saved a few tenths of a gram of weight? For, surely, no manufacturer would make and market such a fragile thing just to save a few fractions of a penny.

Would they?

Wiring jobs have a habit of leading to other wiring jobs. Since the nav station was disassembled anyway, adding an extension cable to the VHF so the handset could be moved to a much improved location out in the cockpit seemed the thing to do. It was, and the new place is much more user friendly, but getting it done was a butt kicker.

All this was a few days ago now, already fading into the haze of “things that got done to the boat”. The good news is that those where the very last of the projects that we wanted to get done before putting an end to the summer's labor. But stopping suddenly, when one has spent months working as hard as possible, is a cold-turkey approach that rarely works. Waking up the next day with nothing that needed to be done was a treat...for about an hour.

Then I noticed that parts of the cabin floor, those made of molded fiberglass nonskid, look really, bad. The piece by the work bench looking particularly battered.  A fresh coat of paint would do wonders. And there just happened to be some paint stashed away on the boat, available for immediate use.

So it got used. Sadly, the fresh coat of KiwiGrip White makes the teak and holly sole look really, really, bad.

I don't guess I'll be going cold turkey after all.

Strolling past the finish line …

Many boat projects are finished late at night after an impossible day of taking a beating. The job is “almost” done as the afternoon wears thin. Putting the final touches on it this day instead of tomorrow becomes a bit of an obsession all by itself. At other times there are compelling reasons to finish the job, like incoming weather that will make the current resting place miserable or even dangerous. Or it might be a cruising permit or visa is running out and Officialdom is demanding one vacate their waters ASAP. We have heard tales of boats needing to get out of FL or face a killer sales tax bill.

Kintala faces an impending need to get along herself. At the end of this month the dock fees around here go from simple larceny to grand theft boat in anticipation of all you rich yacht owners scurrying away from the cold. In spite of that impending assault yours truly didn't work that hard today. And yet I still managed to put the finishing touches on two projects.

The first will mark me as one of the deeply disturbed boat owners in the world, and all are free to guffaw at my weenieness. The board to keep the water and fuel jugs on deck, a near universal trapping on a true cruising boat, was a quick and dirty install made just before we pulled out of Oak Harbor. Raw wood, sharp edges, and the forward lower corner kept catching the port jib sheet during a tack, adding one more stumbling point to getting Kintala's bow through the wind. It was also ugly as dirt and about the same color. Since it had to be removed to dull the edges and get rid of the offending corner, a few hours spent sealing it up with a couple of coats of varnish didn't seem that extravagant a use of time. (That, it turned out, was a minority opinion.)  In any case it was re-installed yesterday with the last coat of varnish still a bit tacky. After cooking in the sun all day today the finish was hard as nails, so the straps went through the slots, the height was adjusted to catch the jugs just right, and everything is back in place. And really, as a finish job it is a “10”. That is, it looks okay from about ten feet away. It isn't like there are 5 coats of hand rubbed clear on the thing. I'm not that big a weenie.

Oh how bad the rest of the non-skid now looks...

The other job put in the finished column today was the deck repair. It still remains to be seen how the stuff will wear, but the initial take on KiWi Grip is that this stuff is The Bomb! Deb mixed up a batch colored to match the deck. (She used to color match the paint that went on million dollar + corporate jets. It is a rare talent. There are few as good as she and none better.) A few strips of tape, some extra KiWi Grip layered where the new fiberglass seam now lay, an open “stipple roller” carefully applied and, like magic, the repair nearly disappeared. There is one small whoopee in the deck where fractured glass gave way to expanding foam, but one needs to look for it.  Other than that it is hard to tell there was a big hole there just a few days ago.

It isn't every day that two jobs get finished while the sun is still high in the sky.

Cheers.