Day 241
Today was a work day. Clark had tons of errands to run. While he did that, I took care of some tax form preparation. For some insane reason I decided to try to bake a strawberry rhubarb pie. Bob from Knot Sew Easy managed it, so I felt motivated to give it a shot. I found a recipe online that said the pie crust recipe was guaranteed. How could I go wrong?!
Baking a pie on board a boat our size is a non-trivial enterprise to undertake. My available counter space on the boat is about 18" deep by at most 22" wide. My boat oven is just slightly larger than the 9" pie plate. I used a water bottle as a replacement for a rolling pin, since I do not have one on board. Unfortunately the bottle was not quite as flat as I remembered it to be when I decided I could "make do" and not buy something else to have to store on the boat.
Even though I started late afternoon on my pie endeavor, it took so long to make that I ultimately ended up multitasking between pie preparation and dinner cooking. Dealing with both simultaneously did not help the counter space issue one bit. The pie crust recipe required that the dough, if that is the correct title for it, rest twice - once after mixing the dough and a second time after rolling it out. I had no idea that pie crust got so tired! To be fair though the strawberry-rhubarb filling required a rest for 30 minutes as well, so it was not just the crust that got tired during the pie-making process.
What with all the ingredients needing to rest so frequently, I finally managed to get my pie in the oven around 8:00. Before starting the cooking process, however, I told Clark that one of my major concerns with the whole pie-baking activity was the possibility of running out of propane partway through the cooking. He ran up to the fly bridge and checked both the pressure and the weight of the tank and said he thought we had about a third of a tank. Sounded reasonable, so I shoved the pie in the oven with reasonable expectations of success.
The recipe called for 425 degrees for 15 minutes and 350 for another 45. When the timer rang after 15 minutes, I cranked the temperature down, punched in the 45 minutes on the timer, and forgot to push the start button. A while later, when I looked over at the timer and saw 45 minutes, I knew I had screwed up. I went over to start the timer and check the oven and found it barely warm! Sure enough the propane tank had emptied itself, and I had no idea how long the pie had actually been baking or at what temperature.
Clark scurried up top to exchange tanks so I could continue cooking. The whole remove old tank, insert new tank, check pressure process took about ten minutes I would guess. Finally I got the stove re-lit and the pie cooking once again. About 45 minutes later as I sat in the galley area trying to figure out how I would know when the pie was done, I suddenly heard loud hissing noises coming from the oven. I jumped up to check the pie and found the filling oozing out of the crust with a steady stream of stickiness landing directly on the bottom of the hot stove having completely avoided falling onto the cookie sheet I put under the pie to catch any spills.
The pie finally got pulled out of the oven somewhere around 9:30. Even though the pie did a lot of resting during the preparation process, I did not. I decided I was exhausted and the disgusting mess that is normally my galley / kitchen would have to wait until the next day to get cleaned. The pie was too hot to eat, so I could not even sample it. I went to bed!
When we hit the Publix food store earlier in the day to purchase the pie ingredients, we found fresh raspberries on sale. Clark was practically drooling in the store, so we bought one of the small containers for his "midnight" snack. Raspberries do not stay fresh very long. When we bought them I told him that he had to eat them today and by today I meant any time before midnight.
At before-bed snack time Clark found the raspberries in the fridge and merrily made his way through the container until he got near the end and saw something he thought looked "suspicious". He brought the container in to ask me (in bed) about the food. Of course I had to sit up and turn a light on to see what he had.
Basically one of the raspberries was growing fuzz and could not be eaten. One would think that a man his age would recognize mold when he sees it! I told him which berries he could eat. He finished them while sitting on the end of the bed, checked the time, and said, "I finished them before midnight!" I think the time must have been something like 11:55! It is a very good thing that I almost always fall back asleep instantly. I was probably back asleep as soon as the light went out and before my head hit the pillow.
Day 242
I woke today with only one agenda item - clean the kitchen area from the pie-making exercise the day before. Dinner dishes that I had also ignored when I went to bed early last night also cried out for attention. However, nothing happens in the morning until I have had my breakfast, so before starting to reduce the mess, I added breakfast dishes to the pile.
Although I had a hard time motivating myself to close my Kindle and pick up my dish rag, I finally managed it, and after some serious dish washing, I found my counter top once more. I thought about sitting down at my computer to do some writing today. I never got to it however. I decided that before sitting down to work on the computer, I needed to open the windows to get some air circulating. After that I decided that I would also like my fan blowing.
The fan turned into a project. The day we went out to run the boat and ended up at Sombrero Reef, our boat got hit by a pretty big wake from a passing boat. The rocking was too much for my poor fan which fell a distance of about ten feet and broke at the neck. I had applied tape to the damaged area as a fix; however, when I pulled the fan out to use it today, the top / fan portion of the poor thing flopped over sideways and made a sort of grinding noise when I turned it on. No good!
Since Clark said he did not see the point to buying a replacement, I decided to try to come up with an alternate fix. I liked my fan before its accident! I really did not want to chuck it in the trash. My first attempt at a fix which involved gluing the neck together using my craft glue gun was a huge fail. The glue did not hold for as long as two minutes. After studying the break and the structure of the fan for several minutes I did come up with a solution involving wrapping wire around the break and then applying glue. I will have to see if the fix holds or if the fan is ultimately destined for the "dustbin".
When I was digging through my craft bin to see what I might come up with to fix my fan, I found a window screen repair kit with some lovely black screen material. I had forgotten I brought it along on the trip. Instantly I had another project - fix the porthole screens on all four portholes. Even though we have none now, we are traveling into mosquito territory in the near future and will need our screens to be functional.
I pulled the screens out of the portholes and cut new screen material to shape. From my assorted glues I found one I thought would work and used it to attach the screening to the frame. I am hopeful that the newly repaired screens will help keep out unwanted insects. I felt quite accomplished given neither of my two repair jobs (fan and screens) were on my to do list when I got up in the morning.
While I was busy with my self-assigned projects, Clark was busy working on boat repair. On his travels the day before he bought the component pieces he needed to put together a locking switch in an enclosed case for the macerator pump. He had to find someone with a drill bit the right size and borrow it to make a hole in the case. That took time and then actually assembling the mechanism took even more time.
Once that job was done, he replaced one of the zincs on the boat. Zincs are placed on a boat to prevent damage to other metals on board. While he was doing that job, the diver showed up with our newly repaired props to be reinstalled on the boat. They worked together to get that job done.
With the zinc in place and the refurbished props back on, Clark and I took the boat out for a test run to see how well it performed. After making sure all was secure on board and the windows all closed to keep any saltwater spray out of the cabin, Clark took the boat up on plane. He wanted to see how high he could go on RPM, and he got close to his desired numbers. However, after we ran at top speed for just a few minutes, an ear-splitting alarm began to squeal.
I asked Clark what was causing the alarm, and after checking the gauges, he said that the port engine was over temperature.He backed down the RPM and the squealing stopped. Thank goodness! My poor ears! He said, "Well, we fixed one problem and found another." The props are now fine, but we need to discover why the engine temperature became too high! Always something with a boat.
After our very quick sea trial, we brought the boat in to dock. My very clean boat and windows now sported a good coating of sea spray! I ran a hose over the boat to get the worst off. Even so, the windows have salt residue marks on them. Sigh!
We had taken the dinghy off the boat so that Clark could replace the zincs and make accessing the props easier. With the dinghy sitting on the dock, Clark noticed some portions that were obviously missed when I worked on cleaning it last time. Since he pointed out the areas that needed to be cleaned, I felt that I had to pull out my cleaning supplies and work on it. I gave it a quick going over to hit the worst spots and it looked better when I was done - not great, but at least better.
After that I left Clark sitting on the swim platform scrubbing off rust marks and applying cleaner / compounding product. I was gone for almost two hours talking to Ben and Jane from Jammin Jane and when I came back, he was still sitting on the swim platform cleaning and compounding. We must have the cleanest swim platform in Florida by now! When he was all done, we put the dinghy back on the boat and called it a night as far as projects were concerned.
For dessert, I tried my strawberry rhubarb pie after dinner tonight. Not bad! I have to see what Clark thinks when he has a piece for his midnight snack. I decided it would have to be the best pie ever to make the time and the mess worth the effort. Until I get Clark's input, the jury is still out!
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