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Steering Shakedown

19 May 2012

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Steering Shakedown

No matter how well it goes, after any major repair, you’ve got to go out and give things a test run. See what stays fixed, what new things break, and how many other things decide it’s all of a sudden time to pack it in and take a vacation. I don’t like to be ruled […]

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Replace Your Hydraulic Steering Lines in Ten Steps or More

17 May 2012

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Replace Your Hydraulic Steering Lines in Ten Steps or More

Old boats are a lot like old cars, in that the minute you’ve fixed one thing on them, something else decides it’s time to take a permanent vacation. And so it is that our minor hydraulic steering leak went from trickling status to OMG she’s bleeding out. We’ve been trying to isolate the leak for […]

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RADAR!

29 November 2011

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After 20 trips up the mast (+-?) we’ve finally fixed the radar. Thanks go out to Johnson Hicks Marine Electronics in Santa Cruz for their help and advice in spite of the fact that they weren’t making much money on us. This is a big deal. Huge.

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New Controls

9 September 2011

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We finally finished installing new (to us) engine control handles in the cockpit today. I thought it would be a couple of hours but it was a couple of days. The work perfectly but I’m tired of rebuilding systems that allegedly were “fine” before we bought the boat. I expected 3-4 weeks of work here […]

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More big progress!

17 July 2011

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More big progress!

Stove? YES! and an oven, wiiiith a broiler. Oh yes. Brownies. We haven’t had an oven for a year. This should be good. First I fixed the wiring, it had a pretty shoddy connection at the solenoid so I stripped back the wires and crimped on some waterproof self-sealing shrink tubing connectors. We still couldn’t […]

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Big progress today!

13 July 2011

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The freshwater system all works now! Imagine that, you turn on the tap and water comes out. You move the toilet lever and the bowl fills with water. You pump the arm and it flushes. Cool. The A/C electrical system all works now! Imagine that, you plug in an appliance and it works. The propane […]

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Before & after

24 May 2011

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This was a lot of work and it was worth it as you can see. Now that the bilge is white, we can actually see in here. The trusty old Perkins diesel is almost ready to bolt in to its new and improved home.

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Work so I can go work

17 May 2011

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After working all last week and all weekend, we’re finally preparing to go to the boat so we can, you guessed it! Work. If you want to do something big like a circumnavigation you’ll need to work pretty hard at some point. Sailing around the world is harder than something like watching TV and ordering […]

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