Last Prep Before Departure

1/14/2017 – 1/16/2017

Saturday the 14^th was an exceptionally busy day. At 8:00, as promised, the painter showed up to touch up the paint on the bow of the boat. He applied the first coat of paint, instructed Clark on how to do the remainder of the coats and buff the area when completed, got paid, and left. Clark was very happy to be told what needed to be done and finish the job himself. He saved money and hopefully will know next time a touch up is needed what to do.

Shortly after the painter left, and while Clark was watching the clock to know when to apply his next coat of paint, Brenda, the woman who has been caring for the boat, came to visit. We toured the boat with her to learn her boat cleaning and care secrets. She explained all the cleaning products she uses, etc. While on tour, we opened one of the hatches to the bilge area and found rusty water. Uh-oh! Looks like the hot water heater is failing. Very soon we will need a new one. They only cost about $1000!!!

All told, we spent well over an hour with Brenda learning her secrets. When done, we walked her to her car to say goodbye and get some lines she had for us. By the time we got back to the boat, the diver had arrived and was already under Sunset Delight scraping away. He says he is meticulous, and we did not doubt his word. He scraped, scraped, and scraped some more for around three hours in total. Clark thought he might have to take out another mortgage to pay for his time, but the fee was reasonable considering the time he spent working on the hull.

I decided I had to get seriously organized in the galley. I found the constant shuffling of a pot to here and a pan to there most annoying. Finding a balance between looking nice and being serviceable presented the largest problem. If I had it handy (whatever it was), the kitchen looked cluttered. I needed to find more cupboard space somehow.

In my quest for a more organized galley I decided to pull out everything under the sink – most of which was left by the previous owner. Fortunately I pulled out everything including the non-skid padding under there. In doing so I discovered that the drain pipe was leaking a constant drip - drip - drip and everything was sitting in water. I could actually see the water beading up on the pipe connection and then dripping off, so I had no problem identifying the root of the problem. I never would have noticed if I had not removed the non-skid pad!

When Clark looked into the problem, in between the thousand other things he was doing, he went to loosen the nut holding two pipes together and it fell into multiple pieces. He came out with a handful of pieces to show me his findings. With all the earlier activities, we did not get to the sink repair until 3:00. Ace Hardware, just down the street from here, closed at 4:00, so we hurried ourselves over there to get the replacement part. By the time we got back to the boat and had the new part installed, the clock had struck 4:00. The only problem with this, however, was that the part did not do a good sealing job, so we had to get another part.

Since Ace Hardware was now closed, we had to drive to a Home Depot about 30 minutes away to get a washer that cost $1.69. We would have bought a part to serve a similar function as the washer while at Ace Hardware, but the salesperson in Ace said, “Oh, you don’t need that!” Clark should have gone with his gut and bought the piece anyway. At $1.69, it would have saved us an hour’s drive!

Sunday found us with a list of three places to visit while we still had a car to get there – food provisioning at Publix, visit the local Verizon dealer, and check out a boat part at West Marine. We decided to visit them in the reverse order due to location and not wanting to leave food in the car while we spent time in the other stores.

Clark wants a converter cable for the electric to the boat to allow for a 30 amp connection at the dock coming into our 50 amps on the boat. West Marine had what he wanted but cost about $100 more than he had seen them online. We passed on this purchase opportunity and went on to our next stop.

Next, we went to Verizon to find out what could be done about my new phone. I got the phone on the Sunday after Black Friday last year, so it is very new. I had suffered with the GPS / Google Maps being dysfunctional all the way from New Jersey to Florida and made annoyingly wrong turns as a result of it. Something needed to be done and now! I asked about the warranty and was told that the last day I could return / exchange the phone was, are you ready, “yesterday, the 14th”! Just my luck!

Although nice and full of suggestions to work around my problem, neither Clark nor I thought the Verizon rep knew exactly what he was talking about. He suggested I abandon Google Maps and use an alternate navigation app called Waze instead. He showed me the features it has that Maps does not. Unfortunately, I like the features Maps has that Waze does not.

After a lengthy discussion on how I might go about getting this issue resolved under warranty (he did not hold much hope for it getting approved as a warranty item), he came up with one “last-ditch effort” to solve the problem. He went into Google Maps and deleted all my data and emptied my cache. My cache was full of junk – many, many megabytes worth. I left the store with a bunch of notes on the warranty approach but truly hopeful that he had somewhat accidentally found the root cause of my problem with the over-stuffed cache.

Clark suggested we have the phone take us back to West Marine to see if it got lost on the way. Unfortunately, the problem is not predictively repeatable. It took us to West Marine and then Publix successfully. This really proved nothing.  Only time would tell if the problem was resolved or lurking to get me when least expected!

After we got our provisioning at Publix done and got back to the boat, I busied myself doing a little this and a little that – still trying to find better ways to get organized mostly. At some point I found Clark in the salon with the covers to the salon light switches removed and the wires all hanging out. Apparently that dimmer that only dims the cockpit lighting but never turns the lights off annoyed him enough for him to dig into the electrical boxes.

As he worked to resolve the problem, he found he needed 14-gauge wire to make a connection, but not wanting to drive an hour to Home Depot and back, he managed to work with the existing wire to address the need. When he finished making the necessary connections, he had a mass of wires to stuff back in the box. Somehow he managed to pack them all in. When we tested his work, we found that Clark had successfully rewired the light so that the unused switch (left over from when the prior owners installed dimmers in the salon area of the boat) had been repurposed to be the off switch for the cockpit dimmable lighting. Fortunately, all the other lights still worked as well!

Whether it was the shopping, organizing, or something else entirely, I will never know but I passed out on the sofa around 8:00 Sunday night. I woke up an hour later, decided to minimize my activities so as not to wake myself up more fully, and fell into bed just after 9:00. I knew from experience that if I allowed myself to wake up completely, I would most likely be up until 1:00 a.m.

Even though I went to bed several hours earlier than usual, I still only woke up this morning, the 16^th, when my alarm went off at 7:30. Then, I still laid in bed for a while before getting up. In fact I fell back to sleep and woke with a start about ten minutes later. I knew I could not sleep in this morning as we had reserved a rental car for 9:00 pickup. Today’s chore was to drive two cars to Fort Myers and one car back to Fort Pierce. We left our personal car at the marina there so that it will be there when we arrive by boat in a few days’ time. Round trip, non-stop driving, took us just under six hours. The good news – my Google Maps did not fail to position me correctly for the entire trip!

About ten miles from the end of our trip, Clark abruptly pulled off the highway into a parking lot and told me I was driving. He managed to get a cramp in the ankle of his gas-pedal foot and said he could not drive any further. I said, “It must be bad if you are stopping this close to being back”. His response, “I see no reason why you can’t drive as you are a perfectly good driver”. That comment pleased me no end, and I drove with a smile on my face for the rest of the trip. Getting a compliment out of Clark is difficult indeed, so I make the most of whatever I can get!

Since I used my accrued points, today’s car rental at Enterprise cost me a whopping great $2.98. For practically free, I can’t say too much about the car we got except that I would not want a Ford Focus even as a gift! When the Enterprise agent dropped us off at our marina, it was late afternoon and we still had a number of tasks to complete in preparation for leaving here tomorrow to head to Stuart, Florida - our first destination with this boat.

In preparation for departure in the morning and to get his hands on the controls one more time, Clark decided to “spin the boat”, i.e. change it from docked bow in to docked stern in. This proved to be a useful exercise. He had trouble operating the boat, and I had my hands full worrying over lines and fenders. Clark made a couple of phone calls to the broker during our test run for helpful instructions on boat operation.

Apparently, he can “spin the boat” a lot faster than I can move two fenders from port to starboard! He asked if we were clear to dock, and I still had my hands full of fender lines! Once ready, he backed in. We had left the lines on the dock to pick up when we came back, but they were set for our bow in tie up, not the stern in, and I found them to be incorrectly positioned. We docked, but it was not as pretty as when we dock Sea Moss. It’s a lot of boat to handle! I expect to improve with time!

While spinning the boat, Clark found yet another problem with the boat. The engine room filled up with exhaust fumes! He turned on a blower to push the fumes out, but it was pretty clear that something was wrong. After we got redocked, Clark left on the blower and spent time trouble shooting the issue. Eventually, he found a large hole where a bolt had come loose and fallen out. He replaced the bolt and has hopefully resolved the problem. Meanwhile, I got a major headache from fumes up in the salon. I hope we don’t have a repeat of that problem.

It took us years to work through all the issues we found with Sea Moss, and she was a new boat. Now that she is just the way we want her, we are selling her. Whether new or used, boats come with problems that need to be worked out. It’s part of boating. Clark says it is like owning a home – there is always something in need of repair or replacement! I am forever thankful that Clark and I are able to work together to resolve issues without calling a repair person for every problem that presents itself.