Everybody's working for the weekend!

Scott, my dad and I headed to the boat yard on Sunday for a long day of work.  The plan was simple - pump out the water that we knew made it's way into our empty fuel tank, put on the brand new (custom) cover (thanks Uncle Bob and your team in R&D!), take a look at the rig, put the biminy back up and call it a day.

We actually got even more done.  Here's what we accomplished, complete with photos:

1)  We pumped water out of the fuel tank, and learned that the *usually* exhaustingly exact guys in R&D made the tank camp upside down and backwards (thank god for my dad having access to an entire R&D department, as this will be easily remedied).   But it looks pretty, doesn't it?

Nice new tank cover - as modeled by Dad!

Wah wah...back to the drawing board...

2)  The grabrails on our boat were absolutely ridiculous.  A previous owner must have made them with very little thought and obviously didn't sail much.  The handrails themselves were strong and sturdy, but each one had 3-5 inches of overhang on either end - perfect for lines to get caught and snag on (it happened a lot to us last year).  NOT GOOD.  So I removed all of them to be taken into R&D to have the overhangs cut off and rounded smooth so nothing can get caught on them. 

See where the yellow tape at the end is?  They will be cut there and rounded off.

See that in front of the yellow tape?  In laymen's speak, this is a disaster waiting to happen.

3)  We removed all the wire halyards, ran messenger lines and removed the two old Lewmar winches from the mast.  These will be replaced with brand new super strong line halyards and Harken self-tailing winches which will not only be a LOT safer at sea, but a lot easier to use.

Get to work Dad! 

Bye bye wire halyard and winch - time to upgrade!

4)  We took a good look at the standing rigging (all the wires that essentially hold the mast up from the sides and forward and back) - and found some issues that our surveyor did not.  Namely that our standing rigging "swage terminals" have a little play in them - and by "play", I mean they wiggle back and forth a bit.  I'm not going to give the whole engineering explanation as to why this isn't good, but for the sake of this blog and time, just know it is not. We are now looking at replacing all of it.  Not the end of the world, but this was unforeseen and won't be cheap.  They say BOAT simply stands for "Bring On Another Thousand" - this could not be any more true.

Overall, we had a very productive Sunday Funday in the boat yard.  I also saw something I have never seen before, so I thought I'd share it here.   This brings whole new meaning to the term "dockside".

If you can't get a slip in the marina!! Bring your own! BYOD!

Surely there is a better way to do this?

Happy Monday!

Brittany & Scott