Friday March 22: Thinking About Heading North

NOTE: Pictures are still not working right ..... you'll have to go back to stay on the blog if you click on a picture.

As hard as it is to believe, it's time for us to start thinking about heading north. After spending 60 years of winters in Cleveland, it is amazing to me how much more quickly the winter passes when the days are sunny and warm :-)

We'll be leaving here at the end of this month - which means it's time to finish up the last minute jobs and making sure that everything on the boat is ship shape.

Which means more boat work. Steve took care of soldering some wires on the electric stove that were old and in need of being reconnected (it was the smell of wires overheating that was the clue!).

Next job was to grind a part of the anchor to make it a bit thinner - this will allow Steve to attach another line to the anchor.

The hole (circled in red) is the place to attach a "trip line" - a smaller, separate line. The trip line is to be used if the anchor gets stuck on something on the bottom and the normal pulling in the anchor line doesn't work.

Ideally, the trip line could then be pulled straight up. This would pull the anchor the OPPOSITE direction from the way it originally dug in. And since we've almost lost the anchor twice now because it was stuck on something (in 70 feet of water), it seemed like the thing to do! Better late than never :-)

Meanwhile, I'm busy swapping out the cabin lights with new LED lights. The old style bulb (on the right) draw somewhere around 20 watts.

The new matrix array LED lights draw 2 watts. It doesn't seem like a big deal but when anchored out any battery power that can be saved is good!

The downside? Quite expensive. These little things cost $15 - and that was a close-out price. But they should last forever and produce a brighter light to boot.

There was a slight mishap in Steve's next project: replacing a wing nut on the engine thru the hull fitting so it could be more quickly closed if the need arose (like a broken hose letting water in the bilge). Shouldn't take long .... remove the wing nut ..... replace with the brass nut we already had purchased ..... attach a ratchet which will remain on the nut .... done. How hard could it be??

Hah. It's a boat. The amount of floor space in the picture on the left is slightly more than 900 square inches. The amount of floor space that is holes is slightly more than 6 square inches.

So the odds of dropping a 9/16" nut and having it land or bounce into one of the holes is roughly 6/900 or LESS THAN 1% Somebody shoulda bought a lottery ticket today is all I will say.

There was a lot of time spent laying next to the engine exploring the bilge by hand. Not a fun job ... I did not even begin to THINK about volunteering for this one!

My solution was to go to the hardware store (Home Depot across the street doesn't carry brass) and get another nut but the store isn't really biking distance.

So more searching went on - even hooked up our little camera on a wire to try to spot it that way - which in the end worked. When I was pushing the camera around taped to a yardstick, I spotted the nut just calmly sitting in the base of the generator. No camera needed, no laying next to the engine needed - just looking straight down :-)

Then the fun part of the day started - LINK!!

When JP was here last week, we discovered that we were both playing the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - he on his DS (3D to boot) and me on my Wii.

The picture on the right is adult Link in the game. The picture on the left is one JP sent to me the other day.

Don't they look amazingly alike??? It was really great: he helped me find a bottle (used to catch live-saving fairies) and I helped him beat one of the bosses as I was ahead of him in the game. We really had great time Linking together :-)

Bike ride today: 8 1/2 miles roundtrip down to and part way across the old 7-mile bridge. Really a nice day but no spotted eagle rays :-(    Maybe next time ......