The Move

Because of clearance issues for the move, everything higher than the handrail on the pilothouse roof needed to be stripped off. Gena didn't believe me when I told her the pulpit was no higher than the handrail, so she bought a laser level ( yeah, we didn't have one before!) and surveyed it up. Sure enough, it was a full inch lower, just like my eyeball down a conventional level said. What will we do with the laser level? Maybe we could use it for scaring seagulls out of the rigging. lol. The first thing we did the next day after seeing the boat had arrived in one piece was go over and check out the progress on the mast, and the mast itself. Wow!! It is BIG! If it were 1 foot longer it wouldn't fit inside the shop. Ocean rigging is accustomed to rigging boats the size of ours ( and bigger ) but it's the extra 6 feet from having it keel stepped that makes it longer. We're happy with the looks of it. Heavy duty and pure white. Nice! More on that later.

Gena looks so happy coming out of the boat. Everything stayed in it's place. Nothing fell off, or broke inside. A good sign. Now that she's here, everything must be put back on as fast as possible. During the course of the first few days, we put the radar arch back up, mounted the antennas, radar antenna, GPS, vhf, wefax, and the anemometer. The anemometer was a goof-up really. Little did we realise, it must be mounted pointing forward. We mounted it going to starboard. With an hour of trying to loosen a set screw, then repositioning, reading, then repositioning again, we managed to get it going the right way.
The radar tilt mount I made works well (photo right), but does get tiring after a while with the crank being so stiff. I guess we won't need to change it very often around here. All of our sailing will be by daylight to start. The life ring mounts I made work well, on land. I guess we'll have to see what happens while in rough water. Better keep the lines bitter end tied to be safe.

Here's a picture of the travel lift that lifted our boat off the trailer. Why couldn't we have had one near our place in Alberta?? The driver makes it look so easy, as he plucks boats out and puts others in all day long. Cool machine. Big too!

One issue that came up was the position of the sidescan sonar unit on the hull. It is in a bad position for blindly lifting the boat out of the water. It was suggested we make a mark on the hull where the strap should be for future haul-outs.

I took some dark blue from when Gena mixed up some ceram-kote for the keel bottom coat, and painted arrows on pointing to it. You can hardly see them unless you're looking for them!

Gena got around to finally putting on the much awaited Lewmar 54 winches. These would have been a really good deal of eBay if the guy had sent us all 3 on the one side instead of only 2. We were already scathed by his disappearing act after that, but later on found out the second winch had missing parts!

Gena was not a happy camper. She, more or less, said if she got her arms around that guys neck... and I think I would have a go. After ordering all the parts, the deal was even less of a "deal". Once again, buyer beware!

She rebuilt all 4 before we came out, and used special marine grease on everything. I mean everything including the gears, bushings, floor, carpet, dining room seats, books, my feet, and whatever else was nearby.

I continued on the arch, wiring in the radar antenna, with it's many wires, in between rain showers, then mounted the C.A.R.D. antenna and ran the cable through the pilot house roof like I did the solar panels. Speaking of solar panels, when we were back home, these panel barely pumped out 4 amps, ever. Now there were some tress but a lot of the time it seemed they were getting direct sunlight. Here I have already seen twice that. Lower latitude? Cleaner air? Who knows. It is interesting though. Some guy back home told me solar panels that far north are a joke. Maybe he was right.
Also, while on the subject of power generation, we have seen the wind generator put out a decent chunk of amperage. Granted the wind here is more steady. It still seems to need a lot of wind to pump out even 10 amps. There is an adjustment for voltage kick-out, but that won't help because it has never kicked out. The nearest I can figure ( because there is a microprocessor in it) is the batteries haven't been run down to a voltage that would cause a 20+ amp flow yet. While we were using power tools, watching TV and running the fridge, we were using house power. There is a power plug over on the adjacent shed, but as we are not parked in a standard slot, cars and trucks run over it all day long so we only charge up in the evening when the traffic is low. The last few days we didn't even bother. The panels were keeping up.
The main power pig, from what we've seen thus far, is the refrigeration. Even in non-freeze mode it gulps down 24 amp hours overnight. It'll be a real pig in tropics I'm sure. Oh well. That's sailing! We won't be pumping diesel into it for sure. Not at these prices. And we have found out from others in the area that the fuel dock actually charges more than at the gas station. This should be "purple" diesel! It should be discounted. And to top it all of, BC is introducing a carbon tax at the end of the month. I think our top 2 tanks will become tool cabinets in the future.

The Pre-launch Week 1 Getting everything back on