Paying for all that slacking

 Been a while since something appeared here in the form of words and photos. A little update on what's going on. You all know by now that we went up north to welcome little Mason. He is doing great, and is growing rapidly.

His belly is starting to outpace his head. Hopefully we will not have a grandson that looks like Alfred Hitchcock.

The kids are starting to get some sleep and get into a routine which is good. Kind of stops the parents from worrying so much. You like to see steady routines and hear happy phone calls all week, not crying and questions. So now that we are feeling comfortable with all that perhaps it's time to shove off? Not so fast my friend! There is much work to do because of your "Summer of Pauly".

Yes, the summer of fun has it's payback. Does everything fun have a downside? I now have a multitude of projects going so that we might enjoy a taste of the Bahamas before we head back north for the summer. I hear people are already migrating north from the keys. Really? Seems early, but I'm sure some of you will see us going in the wrong direction. Just wave and yell SLACKER!

We have several projects that needed to be completed, and they are major. We removed the forward holding, once a water tank. A 135 gal monster aluminum tank is being replaced with two 50 gal aluminum tanks. Yes, aluminum. But we will get alzheimer's from the aluminum right? I did not find any scientific evidence of this being true, only some old guy on a blog ranting about it. He has an FDA sticker on his tank saying it's not safe for potable water. The FDA. OK. I guess BPA in plastic is OK with them, or was until people started asking about it. Moving on...

This is the cavity left form the tank

We only have a 17 inch opening to get a new tank into the v-berth so that is why I designed two tanks port and starboard. I couldn't find a tank manufacturer that would take the drawing of the usable space I had and design two tanks for me. Well, one guy did, but he wanted over a grand for one tank. They made of platinum? So we found this guy, who knows a guy. No, really we found a tank supplier in Jersey who as scary as he was at first turned out to be pretty helpful and reasonable in getting these tanks done. We have not seen them yet, and hopefully it's not a scam website else I'll have to send my brother-in-law Tony to go investigate. They get an A- rating from the BBB so fingers crossed. This will be the last job we have to do before we leave here. Hopefully the tanks arrive this week. They had bad weather up there and an aluminum shipment was delayed. Maybe the driver got alzheimers from all that aluminum and forgot where he was going.

Another project is installing radar. We just got the pole mounted and the dome is in the air. Wiring and more holes remain to be completed. Lot's of holes. Seems all I've been doing is drilling holes around the boat into metal and plastic. The worst is drilling into the deck. I had to put a one inch hole into it to get the Raytheon radar cable and AIS antenna to fit. There is a shiny clamshell over it to make it look professional. I made the hole big enough for future wiring. Not like the last guy who drilled into this deck.

Needs some more mod's but it's up there. Hopefully it stays up there.

Here are some photos of the craftiness that took place in order to get the twenty pound dome up the backstay. Not sure if this is the way to go but I know from racing that any weight on the mast has to be countered below the water and I'm not doing that. Too picky? Maybe. But it is a SAILBOAT after all and we do love to sail. Maybe I read too many Dennis Conner books.

A drill press and chop saw would have saved time.

I really wanted thicker lexan. 

I used 1 in stainless. A thicker pole would be better.
That's what she said! Sorry.

We do have a place for Jerry cans, and an actual name on the boat. One side only. The other decal has not come in yet. I only ordered one to see how it looked. Not bad. At least now when you see us on the water you can say, "Hey, there's that slacker."

We have a bottle of Dom to make our offering to the sea Gods before we leave. We need to do this for good luck after a name change. It's really tough to decide on a name. Most people want it to mean something, and two engineers are not artsy enough to come up with anything cool. Both of us doing electrical engineering all our lives you would think we could have come up with something along cool like:

Watts up!, AC/DC (could be misinterpreted), Common Ground, Sailing Hertz, Little Resistance, Polarized, Enjoyment=IRsailing, Balanced Load, Capaseator (ugh bad), Electri-sea-t (really?) I better stop.  VoltsWagon!

See what I mean. In the end we just thought we would name her after the kids. We miss them, and this is our way of keeping them close, even if the boat sounds like a fishing vessel. The shamrock is for their smiling Irish eyes they get from their mother. They get the bags from me.

I see I tied the power cord to the wood.
Maybe I'll just hang the cord there.

Today we are moving onto the next big project, not that the others are complete mind you, we just need to knock off the major construction items while we are still dockside. So next up is the watermaker. Thirty gallons of fresh water, only to be tainted by the mind wasting aluminum tanks. Actually we will be filtering out the metal, we hope. If we ever tell you we are heading back to New York and going up the Hudson and through the canal, stop drinking from aluminum tanks immediately!

This looks like fun.

We will try to document this watermaker install as much as possible as there are a few M44 owners out there that are curious as to where we will fit all this. So far we have found a spot for everything, thanks to Deb's engineering mind. I'll list where I thought the membranes should go, and where Deb recommended. Good thing she's here.

Retirement is going well for Deb and as far as I can tell I've only pissed her off once that I know of, but I'm sure there were more times. We are both adjusting to life no more than 40 feet apart, 24/7. 

So, back to work. 

Cheers!

P