Month: January 2018

Tool of the Day …. Teak Oil

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I made the mistake of searching the internet for the proper way to maintain teak wood on a boat. As soon as I found one website that said “clean the wood with Murphy’s Oil Soap and the use teak oil” I found another web site that stated “Why would anyone use oil on an already oily wood? You need to varnish your wood to preserve it.” Sigh.

I choose to stick to the cheapest and easiest way to maintain the wood. Even saying that, with the amount of teak in the interior of our boat, it still took four days to treat it all. I think it looks really good, what do you think?

Tool of the Day… Winch Grease

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One of the projects on our task list when we made it to Florida was to service the winches. Or, as our friend Nathan says, “SERVICE THE WINCHES!!!”

When we tried to turn the winches by hand, one was frozen and wouldn’t turn. So we figured we’d do them all at the same time. I had no idea what this entails, but luckily there are manuals, and YouTube videos, and lots of instructions. The tricky part, is even the vocabulary of winches is not strictly regular English.

Do you have any idea what a collet is? Or a pawl? Or gear spindle? Since I didn’t know any of these words, it made interpreting those instructions a little bit tricky. And who knew those winches would turn into such a gigantic pile of small parts?

Mike was in charge of taking the winch apart and cleaning all of the parts. I was responsible for applying oil and grease, and putting them all back together. Eventually …… we actually succeeded in getting them all back together. But not on the first day we tried.

Our first Visitors!

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It’s been two months since we left Boulder, CO and we’ve definitely had time to miss our friends and family as we attempt to get adjusted to our new lives. In mid-November, we had our strongest supporters show up for a visit – Micki and Nathan!

These guys have believed in us since we first started talking about this crazy sailing dream. And they’ve encouraged us to go for it! Even throwing us a huge boat warming party before we left Colorado.

So maybe we were a little optimistic when we invited them to join us to celebrate putting our boat back in the water and holding a grand renaming ceremony. Huh. Three weeks in St Pete and we still have no fuel tank, no toilet, no dinghy, no…. well everything you need to have a working boat! Good think Micki and Nathan are such good sports! The spent the weekend helping us with boat projects, and may have forced us to get out and experience St Pete a bit – a very welcome break from the boat yard!

Nathan was a trooper, and finished up all of the bilge painting, somehow contorting himself into tiny spaces to make it all work.

And we checked off a big project on our list …. testing the anchor windlass, confirming that all of the anchor chain is in good condition, and marking every 25 feet of chain with a different color, to make it easy to tell how much chain we lay down in an anchorage. Micki helped me let out all 250 feet of chain, markings every segment with colorful plastic zip ties. Zzzzzzz….ippppp that noise always makes us smile!

We had a couple of portlights with torn screens – not acceptable for anchoring in the everglades and other areas where there will be lots of mosquitos! Micki took over the task of measuring, cutting, and shaping the screen frame. Then we cut screen fabric donated by a boatyard neighbor to make perfectly sized screens!

After such significant accomplishments, we deserved a little down time to explore Central Ave in St Pete, including the Emerald Bar and had wonderful charcuterie in the courtyard of our Airbnb.

On the way back to the Tampa airport, we stopped at The Getaway near the Gandy Bridge, and pretended that we were already in the Caribbean with our toes in the sand.

Thank you so much for coming to visit and for helping to make our dreams real!

Tool of the Day …. Drill Pump

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Remember when I told you about the diesel fuel in the bilge? Well, we finally tried to pump all the fuel out. But … apparently petroleum products kill the rubber diaphragms in the pump.

So, R.I.P. to the 3 pumps that we killed trying to extract the diesel from the bilge. And we still ( by we, I mean I) bailed the rest of the diesel out manually with a cereal scoop and some paper towels.

Tool of the Day …. Bilgkote

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Final step of reclaiming the black water holding tank of tool box storage consisted of several coats of bilgekote; a very thick paint. This did a good job of sealing the hold surface after sanding, and removed any remaining waste odor. It worked so well here, that I continued to paint all of the hold storage compartments and the entire bilge. A mask was key! At one point I think I came very close to passing out while upside down in the hold, breathing in those fumes!

And just for fun, a few gratuitous boat / tool chaos pictures! I’m grateful that we decided to rent an Airbnb instead of trying to live on the boat during these initial project stages. It gave us a place to escape to every evening to shower, eat, sleep and then start all over again the next day. PLUS, we had internet access to research all of our questions about the next step in each project.