And then this weekend..
I got up Saturday morning, and loaded my toolbox, and some of my Ryobi tools into the car, and headed North. I swung a detour through Lowes in Oswego to pick up an 8' length of 1" aluminum square tubing as my local stores had none, and arrived at the boat. This was one of the highlights of my weekend. Not that it was a total bust, but mostly.
My Newport 28 was on an end slip, though my actual assigned slip was one finger down, I just needed a wide u-turn to swing it over. But before I did that, I decided that since I was parked stern in, I would use that to my advantage and decided that one of the first projects would be putting the new solar panel on. After all, that's what the aluminum is for. Also, it still doesn't sit right in my head that square tubing is still called tubing. Just putting that out there. Anyway, first, I needed to get the boom and mainsail out of the cabin, and mounted. That part should be easy enough. And it was. This was the point where I would start to hoist the main to get all the slugs in and everything shaken out. First order of business, was to grab the main halyard, which is now on the correct side of the mast. What wasn't correct - is that it was led from the masthead, through the spreader, and down. I looked at the other side, and the head sail halyard was the same way, though both ends of it were crossed over. And then I noticed the actual masthead, and realized I'm in a much bigger pickle than just trying to get my lines tossed over the spreaders.
When I put the halyards back on, and in the correct position, somehow I had managed to feed the halyards over the tang for the forestay instead of under it. This means that they are basically running along the metal, instead of free. While they probably would work that way for the short term, it's far from ideal and would likely mean much accelerated wear and chafing on the lines. Coupled with the fact that they're also through the spreaders and the easiest, though most annoying way to fix it, is going to be to see about being hoisted by crane to the top so I can sort it all out from there. It really shouldn't take more than fifteen, twenty minutes, but still. It does mean no sailing until then. That was unfortunate. A lot of it falls on my shoulders, sure, for not realizing there was a mix-up. However, I would've preferred they would've just dropped the mast back down onto the deck and dropped a line to let me know, instead of putting it up as it was. Surely they had to have seen, if not the forestay hiccup, that the rest was twisted? Well, that'll get sorted sometime.
Back to the solar panel. My last panel was a 100 watt HQST panel, which was mounted on 1" x 1/8" aluminum bar stock, and used 1" conduit clamps to hold the bars onto the rear rail, cushioned from scratching it with some rubber bits. Since this new panel is larger, I wanted something stronger to mount the panel onto. The smaller 100 watt panel had ever so slightly a hint of flex on those bars, so I opted for the square tubing which will eliminate any of that. I measured off the width, about 27" wide on the panel, so I used my sawzall - a high precision cutting tool, and zinged off two lengths to use as rails. Fortunately, Aluminum is soft, since I had only a limited set of drill bits with me, and I had holes in each end of the bars, as well as one to mount my fancy rail clamps to. Now, the fun part - how does one hold a massive solar panel, very off-balanced, and somehow fasten the outside half of the clamps? Very awkwardly, as it turns out. And it was when I realized that I should've measured one more thing before I did it. The distance between the holes on the frame of the solar, happens to be a dead-on match for the same distance between the stanchions on the pushpit. This means that the clamps can't actually latch on. I decided to fix this by shifting the rails from perpendicular, to a slight angle which would lead the clamps to the railing on the outside of each end. some thrice-folded cardboard wedged into the solar panel rails to prevent damage, and I re-drilled two new holes. I found that by leaving the end bolts out to start with, I could get it in position and clamps in place, and then bolt it all up, and voila, all good. Oh wait, I need to get some support. My last panel was only slightly weighted aft, so I just had some small lines tying to the front down to hold it level. This one, being heavier, I picked up some adjustable bimini poles and clamps, mounted them to the other rear mounting holes on the panel, and then I was officially done with the panel.
Pictures taken after I did move the boat, but you can see the general idea. The first shows a wide-angle picture of the panel, the 2nd a better shot of the bimini pole, and the third, a close-up of the bar clamp and aluminum tubing mounted to the panel. Those clamps are typically used for mounting light bars and accessories to ATVs and handlebars, but work well for this application as it turns out. They clamp down with hex head bolts, and have varying rubber inserts to account for everywhere from 7/8" to 1 1/4", if memory serves.
So after the panel was mounted, then it was time to zing the boat around. This outboard, I tell you. So I assumed the reason that they left the boat where it was, was because the motor wouldn't start. Wouldn't you know it, it wouldn't start for me, either. I had both gas tanks on the boat, the old and new. The old tank, I now can't remember if I had purchased a new fuel hose or if it was one the previous owner had sent me, but the new one, I know is fully brand new. I rebuilt the carb here at home a while back, and tested the motor for a while in a bucket outside, forward, neutral and reverse, and other than it was temperamental when sitting for a bit, it was fine. When I took it up to the boat a month ago, I left it hooked to the old tank with the thinking that since it had run off the old tank last year, there shouldn't be any issue burning up what's left of that gas. So after using my home-tried and true method of a couple squirts into the carb, it would sputter and then die right out. I finally tried switching back to the new tank, and again a squirt, and then it started right up and kept running. I let it run for a few minutes, gave it some juice in forward to make sure it would go, and indeed it does. I couldn't use reverse since I was already up against the dock.
At this point, I untied, and putted over to my slip and tied up. Then the motor started getting sputtery again. This was when I realized that while it would run fine in neutral, and forward gear, as soon as I turned it to reverse, it would die out. The only counter was if I had the adjustment cranked so the motor was revving handily, then it seemed to go, but would also be more aggressive. Usually I would be even more annoyed, but since I couldn't exactly go out and get the sails shaken out anyway, there was no point. I tilted and lifted the outboard up, and turned my attention elsewhere.
I could only think of a couple other things to play with. One of which was already on the boat - my Raspberry Pi setup for OpenCPN. There's a lot more of this to get into, but since I already had it set up at home before, I knew it wouldn't take much. I snipped the wall adapter off the cable, since it was a 12 VDC output, and wired the monitor direct to my Instruments switch in my DC panel. The Pi itself needs too much amperage to turn on than is provided by my USB-C phone charger, so I left it plugged into the inverter, and turned it on. Within a few seconds, the screen lit up, OpenCPN started automatically, and within another minute or two, I had a GPS fix showing exactly where I was in the marina. Nice. I found a good spot for the monitor to mount to, just need to fashion a bracket and such, but I do have a good location for it.
I ripped everything out of the cockpit lazarette out of boredom, and really cleaned it out this time. Keeping a few old halyards, and lengths of line (never can have enough), I left them coiled up and stored nicely, and left the anchors in there on top of them. A lot easier to get things now without it all getting tangled or having to drag everything out. Afterwards, I decided it was also time to try one more project. I decided to tackle my floor. Prior, it had a couple of heavy duty carpets on the floor, probably visible on some old pictures. I had picked up some cheap foam faux-teak floor, and some 3M spray adhesive. If this was a forever boat, I would've taken a lot more time to organize, measure, trim and... ok, that's a lie. If it was my forever boat, I wouldn't be using this stuff. So instead, I got to work. This stuff comes in a 3' x 8' section. As it happens, the cabin sole is about 3' 3" wide. Luckily, from the companionway entrance to the main bulkheads is just about 8' long in itself. I did find out that when you peel the backing off to reveal the adhesive, it does shrink a little overall. But after a little trimming, and trying to keep it centered as much as I could and cutting out room for the bilge boards - I originally intended to get some thinner boards and then put more of this foam on those boards to fully match, but I actually don't mind how it looks this way - it does make it look halfway decent in there. We'll see next time I get up there, if it remains stuck.
