More Progress

We're back in the water! (Well, you know what I mean. Arione is back in the water.) Art went up last weekend to install our new loudhailer/foghorn speaker, and found:

The watermaker is in! I really like the way they put the panel behind a plexiglass door. We can see the gauges, but they can't get kicked. That area used to be a set of drawers that we rarely used. The space that the pumps and filters are in is where our engine start battery used to be (when we had a 6D for a start battery) before we redid our electrical system 5 years ago. OK, strictly speaking, we didn't do this - if we'd tried, we'd probably still be at it. This space was brought to you by Ron Romaine. It's under the berth in the aft cabin, up against the bulkhead that separates the aft cabin from the galley.





















The new cold plate for the fridge/freezer is in as well. We kept the old plate, which can be run by the engine driven and AC compressors. The new one is only run by the AC compressor, which we upgraded to a water or air cooled unit (so that we can close the seacock when we're away from the boat). Why a new plate? We used to have trouble actually keeping the box cold with the AC without running the genset for hours on end. David from Sea Freeze, who built the plate and is doing all the refrigeration work, looked at our system and determined that the old plate was biased toward the engine compressor, as in it had a lot more tubing in it for the engine compressor than the AC one. The AC compressor didn't have enough to work with, basically. This should fix that.

The hull is all shiny - Seaview did a really nice job on the wax:

We're headed up to the boat tomorrow to spend our first night aboard in nearly six months. This has been the longest stretch we've ever gone not sleeping on our boat. Granted, we'll still be in the yard, but at least we'll be in the water. With any luck, we'll be bringing her back to Seattle next weekend via Port Townsend - the weather even looks like it may be nice - current forecast is for 70 and sunny!

Progress

We went up to the boat on Saturday to take care of a couple of things it seemed silly to pay the yard to do. The radar mount had some corrosion where the bolts holding the radome went through. Since having the radar fall off would be a very bad thing, Art wire brushed, primed and painted the corroded parts.




While he was doing that, I scrubbed the spreader leathers - there aren't any before pictures, but trust me, these are a lot better. The leather was green. It really is true that moss will grow on just about anything in our climate. I thought I might need to restitch them, but the stitching was in amazingly great shape at five years old. (Thanks Keith!)




The bottom is done, and it looks great. Prop's still not back in, there are watermaker parts all over the cabin, and there are about a million little things that need to get wrapped up, but it looks like we may have a boat again soon. We can't wait.