LandfallVoyages

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 quite get the stove working because there was a strange random valve under the setee (couch for you dirt dwellers) that we didn’t find for a while. I started tracing out the whole propane system to see if the copper tubing was kinked somewhere and like a treasure hunt from boat hell I found the valve. Sure, it worked right away, as soon as I opened the wacky valve.

Hot water? YES! We plugged in the hot water heater and it worked just fine. That’s about the first thing on this boat that worked just fine. Now if you open the faucet, hot & cold water comes out. Even warm if you want it. A MIRACLE!

Autopilot wiring, I'll have to get back to this.

Autopilot? YES! It worked once before but stopped for no good reason. The internal fuse was blow. You gotta love those fifty-nine cent fixes when you get them. Better than $2000.00 for a used autopilot.

The boatyard guys finally had enough time on Friday to move the boat around to the back of the building where all of the bottom painting is done. They should be able to get the bottom painted this week and then we can splash the boat anytime after the paint dries. I’ve never had a good view of the front of this boat before. It’s beautiful.

We scored an SSB radio and an antenna tuner. Typically a new setup would be about $2500.00 and up, it looks like we’ll get this pair for about 1/5th of that. The radio had an internal fuse that was blown. They should put those internal fuses on the outside. This will enable us to communicate around the world from the middle of the ocean and with a Pactor modem we can send & receive text email and weather faxes as well as regular broadcast weather reports. I prefer the faxes with all the arrows and squiggly lines and little numbers to the forecasts. It seems that I’m at least as good at forecasting as the meteorologists. I know, that isn’t saying much.

We have the mast & boom all rigged up to lift the engine in to the boat. We should have done that today but the inside of the boat looks like the free pile after a yard sale so we need to clean up a bit before we pull all of the deck plates up to lower the engine into the compartment. A Perkins 4.108 weighs about 600 lbs. It’s scary to have 600 lbs waving around 10 feet above your head supported by ropes. Good thing we’re brave and strong.