We've had a new boat now for a few weeks, but I've had a little difficulty calling it a sailboat because until today it didn't actually have any sails on it. Since the halyard fiasco, we've only managed to get one halyard installed, the only one that we had on the boat that was fit to be used, the inner forestay halyard. All the other halyards are on order and are on their way here, but for now we only have the one. So today in the middle of all the little projects that we had to accomplish we decided to stop and try hoisting the couple sails that we have for the inner forestay just so we could actually have a sail on the boat. The sail up, we stood back and admired her. Even so scantily clad she was pulling at her dock lines and ready to go. I can hardly wait to see what happens with her full suit on. Seeing as tomorrow is supposed to be a perfect sailing day, we may just take her out on the lake and see how fast she'll go on the one sail. So now we have A . Sail . Boat. In the most literal sense since we only have one useable sail.
On another note, one of my projects was to do something about the port lenses. We have Beckson ports on this boat which are great ports, but 30 years of wind and weather and dirt in the screens have taken their toll. To plug Beckson's site a little, they do an admiral job of detailing parts for their ports and making them available for any port that they've ever built in the history of the company. I had been scoping out the replacement lenses, but they were $38.95 each. Not a bad price don't get me wrong, but we have 13 ports in our boat and that just wasn't in the budget. A friend of ours at the marina suggested we try a new product he'd seen, Meguiars Heavy Duty Headlight Restoration Kit. I picked one up and brought it out this weekend and I was completely impressed.
Here's the before:
So if you have old ports in your boat, give this stuff a try. It took me about 40 minutes per window because ours were so bad, but definitely better than the bill for 13 new ones!
And yet on another note in the continuing what-did-we-pay-for-in-the-survey saga, I took the propane bottles to the propane place today to have them filled and it appears that we have illegal bottles with the old valves on them that are many many years out of date. Seems like that might be worth mentioning in a survey, no?
And yet on another note in the continuing what-did-we-pay-for-in-the-survey saga, I took the propane bottles to the propane place today to have them filled and it appears that we have illegal bottles with the old valves on them that are many many years out of date. Seems like that might be worth mentioning in a survey, no?
