Tick Tock, still no dock

Weather sure has a way of toying with one's agenda. After having the week before last off but not able to get the boat in, the marina had hoped to be able to get me launched last week. I hoped they could hold off until the weekend so that I could be there for it, but either way was fine with me. I had gone up last Saturday and run the motor to get it warmed up, so to speak, after all.

So this weekend I went up and, well... waited. Well, for a lot of things - water, dryness, charging, to name a few.

I arrived Saturday around 11 AM, and upon entering, I could hear this constant high-pitched tone. Weird, that's the noise my power inverter makes at low voltage. So, I pulled up my Victron bluetooth app to check my batteries. Bring on the collective gasp - 5 volts. Have you gasped yet? For the uninformed, I have a 12v battery bank. And with batteries of such, in order to maximize (or - NOT KILL) your batteries, the recommendation is to not drop below a 50% state of charge. And I most certainly dropped. I was confused, VERY confused, when I saw the readout. That is, until I glanced up and realized that I had left my bilge pump in full running mode. For two weeks. We can get into the fact that it's wired wrong at any other point in time.

I have a 100 watt solar panel that did it's damnedest but after three days straight, judging my the history graph, it just couldn't take any more. I did my best to position it better throughout the days to maximize capture, and was getting about 85 watts most of the time. It did put a big damper in my wanting to use my laptop at night though. I don't have access to power where I'm on the hard, so I've always relied on the batteries, and never usually have a problem, but when you obliterate your battery with a constant drain, well, there's only so much you can expect. I even went so far as to hook up my emergency jump pack from my car to the bank just so I could power up the inverter long enough for about a half hour online. I gave up.

So what else to do, while waiting. I walked around the beach a few times, and watched the travel lift get stuck trying to retrieve a boat from it's stands to launch. This makes me less hopeful for my own prospects. I'd like to think where I am is a little more hardpacked than the grassy area of this other one, but it's still disheartening. I then decided to re-mount my fishfinder which is basically my depth reading, and that's it, onto a swing arm in the cabin so that I can move it in and out and not have it outside all the time. It isn't that it's not weatherproof, it is. But the area in which it was mounted, was in dire need of repair. There was an old regular piece of thin plywood that was just caulked into place to cover old instrument holes, and it all just needs help. So by removing it, it frees me up to eventually fix that. Last time up, I did glass over the inside of the holes, and this time, I started filling them with thickened epoxy. A little more to go and I can sand, fair, and paint that area and finally make it less awful looking. But regardless, I mounted the fish finder in the cabin on a swing arm, and fed the wire out the little access board I have. Should I mention that I wish I had brought a saw with me?

I also mounted a little voltage meter I ordered off Amazon for a few dollars. I'd prefer something fancier but it would really be overkill for what I use, and the money spent on one would be almost enough to effectively double my battery bank and another solar panel. And that is definitely planned for this summer.

I put a couple coats of Urethane on the table. And waited. That was all my weekend was, really. Oh, Sunday morning I got up and pulled the floor of my GL apart to see if I had water ingress. Nope. A story for another post, but it was something to pass the time with. And at the end of Sunday afternoon, still no water beneath the hull, and only a 75% battery bank by that point. I called it quits and headed home.

And 45 minutes later, turned back around to come close the hatch that I forgot to take care of when I left. Oops.

One step closer. Or six.

As we still wait for the waters to subside - which could be a while - I decided that with the coming week off of work that I had intended on spending on the boat, would still be started in spirit. So here's a slight timeline breakdown of what happened.

Saturday:

I loaded up the car (truck, SUV, whatever you want to call it), and headed up to the boat. I didn't need to take anything other than clothes and a ladder since I had left all my tools up previously. So the first thing I noticed on site, was that there's still plenty of water on the ground. Lake Ontario this year, as with all the Great Lakes, is suffering from much greater levels than normal. At last check, Ontario itself was almost three FEET higher than normal. And considering the shore isn't usually three feet above water level, it has led to lots of flooding and water issues. Fair Point Marina is no exception. Luckily, they use floating docks, which are less impacted, but the grounds themselves are. Compared to a normal year, only a fraction of the boats are in their slips, and even the launch area has been under water for a lot. Here's a map of the grounds. My boat is where the yellow circle is (that's not my boat, but it's where it stands). The red lines show where that particular section of road was blocked off due to a trailer and equipment on one end, and a section of docks stored on the other. No problem for me, I took the long way around, parked to unload, and then moved my cartrucksuv back to the normal parking area on the left side of the map.

For reference, here's a picture I just grabbed off the live feed webcam:

I decided first thing on my agenda would be to fit the new starboard bulkhead into place. The pieces I had pulled out, measured 7/16", but I'm not sure what it was actually made of. It was certainly plywood, and varnished, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was just off-the-shelf stuff used at some point. The new pieces being 1/2" thick, presented a slightly tighter fit, but I did manage to get them in place, drilled and mounted. Here's a shot of the old one with the rotted wood, and thre replacement.

Then I sat back and tried to figure out what to do next. After careful consideration, I splashed a little bottom paint over the previous fiberglass patches. Back up on deck, I then decided that since I was sick of tripping over the remnants of the plywood sheet - a 5' x 4' section was left from the bulkhead project - so it was time to break out the saw. I used a regular basic jigsaw run off my inveter on the boat for my cutting, and it did rather well. A bunch of cuts later, and I was left with a new cabin table, a new section to use for my switch panel, and even new companionway boards, though those were more of a test than anything else. The originals were 4 boards, with a notch top and bottom to fit together. Without an easy way to make such a notch, like a table saw, I opted to try using the adjustable base on the jigsaw which angles to 45 degrees in either direction. Not ideal in that it leaves a pretty sharp point, but it did in practice manage to lock them together. I ran to Lowes and picked up some Minwax. I intended to get Varnish, and instead, ended up with a Stain/Polyurethane product because I got looking at colors and not labels. But I decided to forge ahead anyway, and stained the top of my table pieces and left them a couple hours to dry. Tossed some stain on another piece too. At that point, it was pretty much time to call it a night, so locked myself in, and watched some YouTube before bed.

Sunday:

I woke up knowing that I needed to find some motivation. It took a good drink of Crystal-Light-infused water, but I dragged myself up and decided to tackle the halyards. The easiest way to do this is with the mast down, which I was fortunate enough to have. But rather than try to fish them up and down the sheaves while perched on a ladder, I muscled the mast forward, until the masthead was on the stern rail and unbolted the piece on top. Laid the new halyard in place, bolted it back together, and then took the chance to flip the masthead arrangement for the VHF, anchor light, and the windex. The prior setup had the wind indicator at the front, which meant angling my head forward to see it, and it was just annoying. So now it's back to a traditional layout, and ready to go. While at it, I reused one of the prior halyards for a spinnaker set on the double block that was already mounted on the mast.

Back inside, I managed to put the hinges to a slightly larger table. The original design as best as I can tell, was a fold-down table from the bulkhead that could then open up to give a full-width table. Mine had at some point, been replaced with a slightly shorter, single table. I reverted back to the original style.

After the table, I tackled fixing the switch panel area. Prior to doing much, I glassed over the backside of the original instrument holes in the cockpit bulkhead to seal from weather. And then just used a stained piece of the marine ply as a new panel to cover up all the holes in the inside. Here's a before, and after:

Once I had decided that I was done playing in sawdust, I couldn't think of much else to do, so I passed the time with some painting of the liner inside. At some point, the main cabin area was repainted with a tan color, possibly to just cover up old dirt? And the V-berth area was painted in a dark blue. The problem is that it makes it rather dark inside, indeed. And without loading up with too much more light, the easiest way to brighten a room is to lighten a color. So a few coats of white in the upper half of the V-berth as a test, as well as the main ceiling of the main cabin, and I was surprised at the coverage. It certainly needs to be done proper, but for what little effort I put in, I was pleased.

I stayed until Monday evening, before realizing that with little to do on the to-do list any longer, there was no point staying on board while on the hard, so I came home. I did receive an e-mail this evening scheduling my launch for next week sometime. I'm hopeful they can push it til the weekend, but either way, I'll head back up this weekend with fresh spark plugs and gasoline for the outboard, as well as a sawhorse and barrel and give the outboard a good testing once more, just in case they launch mid-week when I'm unable to be there.

With any luck, we'll be wet soon, from the bottom up instead of from the sky down.

High Tide

Rocky and wet start to this year, that's for sure. Very high waters on Lake Ontario have hampered my launch a little, but not so much as needing to finish a few things going into the season.

A couple weeks back, I went up to assess the situation, and get the boat lined up and ready to go in the water. That was the plan anyway. Met my dad up there, we looked a few things over. First and foremost I wanted to get an idea for some measurements for things like the thru-hulls, the cockpit width and so on. I also pulled the outboard and brought it home, since I had left it with the boat the whole winter. I'm good like that. We also noticed some starboard bulkhead rot. Even though there were no signs of corrosion on the chainplate, the wet wood behind it was unmistakable.

Fast forward a little, to two weeks ago. I went back up, glazed over the old transducer with some thickened epoxy as basically a fairing compound and to seal it from the outside of the hull - this is the one that was seeping water at first launch last year, so this should prevent that from recurring. I also made a wooden plug coupled with more epoxy and covered with a couple strips of fiberglass to the old head discharge. This was the one that had a pinhole leak in the valve handle when in the open position. And since I couldn't even budge the valve off the thru-hull even with a pipe wrench, this seemed the next best way to give a little extra protection for that too. I do still have to go back up, sand, prime and paint those spots, but at least the hard work is done.

The outboard is refitted on the mount, after being able to get it fired up. I still haven't figured out why it gets temperamental when it sits for extended periods of time, but I THINK I've narrowed down a way to speed up the process of starting it in those cases. We'll see soon enough, and if I prove correct then I shall reveal my secrets. Otherwise I'll say it, it won't work, and I'll look like an idiot.

The most important part though is still sitting home and waiting replacement - that Starboard bulkhead. I removed it when doing the other work, and it does come out intact. The way the chainplates interact with each other is a little strange, but I removed the bulkhead and brought it home. My hope is that next weekend I'll be able to pick up new plywood, cut it out using the old section as a template, and take it up. Seal it with some epoxy, and get it back in and then seal the chainplate better. Can't really put the mast up in any manner of confidence until I get the new wood in there, so that's where I'm at right now.

Good thing the weather has been junk and that I took time to go on a small road trip, or I'd be a little sad about not being on the water yet.

The season approacheth.

First, I'll apologize for the falling off at the end of last season. There wasn't much to report in on afterwards. Didn't get much chance to take the boat out afterwards, but did spend a couple weekends on it towards the end of the season at the slip. Just to get away from home, really. Other than that, there wasn't much excitement, and eventually it was hauled out and stored in the corner of the yard. I spent a good chunk of this winter fighting with the Jag more than anything, and with any luck, will have a replacement soon enough. With that out of the way, here's what I'm looking forward to this year:

There were a couple of things I had made note of last year that I wanted to address while on the hard this spring. The first, is the over board discharge thru-hull from the old holding tank. The ball valve on it is not really in the greatest shape; If you open the valve, there's a pinhole leak in the handle area. Closed it's fine, sure, but I'm not full of a lot of trust that something doesn't go wrong. If I had time and weather, I would likely glass over the whole hole. But I'm not sure if that'll be an option this year, based on the location of the boat in regards to power, and sanding, etc. I can run an inverter off the car and do that, but I prefer not to sand fiberglass in the yard, considering the setup and everything. So the option this year may be to just replace either just the ball valve itself, or both it and the thru-hull with something new.

The next is similar. When we launched the boat, we noticed seeping water in an existing depth transducer thru-hull on the port side. Tightening down the ring had solved that problem. However, it's a wooden backing plate on it that seems to me like it just might end up repeating this. My guess is that it first gets wet, gets soggy and then leaks until it's compressed down again. I'd like to replace that, or again if time permits, glass over it. If nothing else, I'd like to pull the old backing block off, fashion a new one down with thickened epoxy and sealed, and see if that fixes it. It's not used for anything, but if it saves me having to glass over and repaint for another year, all the better.

Next up is the outboard. I'm looking for something more reliable. This old Merc does work, when used regularly. I did find that I liked the tiller shift on it, especially for low-speed maneuvering in the marina. But when I don't get to get there every weekend, and then it starts taking a long time to pull start it, it does get old in a hurry. I had an offer for a used Tohatsu from a gent in the marina, and if he still has it, I might. If not, I'll find one on Craigslist before the boat goes in the water. I'll just get used to the lever again.

And then rounding out the plan, is just new gear in general. New Fortress anchor, new halyards including a spinnaker set, replacing the one last missing stanchion, and fixing the pulpit finally. Then, a summer of enjoyment.

Mostly the last one.

A light weekend

Not much happened last weekend, other than going up and hanging out on the boat for the day, and finally getting my lazy self to work with some soap to scrub some of the deck. It actually made the boat whiter. Who knew!

So that was how last weekend went. Now let's fast forward to the first weekend in August. Leading up to this week, my brother had been hoping he'd be spared a weekend at work and be able to come up and enjoy some weather. But with the nature of the beast, comes the last minute text that he would need to head back in on Saturday. Hopefully he can get up next weekend and enjoy taking it out, even if I won't be able to join due to some other stuff I have planned already. However, the bright lining is that I had talked to my dad earlier as well and told him he was more than welcome to join. So even though my brother couldn't, my dad could. It's always more fun to take the boat out with company. It also makes docking a whole lot less stressful, as long as they are on the same page as you are. Don't believe me? Well fine.

I had intended on going up Friday night after work, but had some minor surgery to perform on one of the cars. Up early to do that on Saturday, and I finally got loaded on the the road around 10:30 AM. After stopping to grab some quick food - hot dogs and sandwich ingredients, I arrived at the marina about five, ten minutes after my dad had. I was glad he didn't have to wait for me too long. Wasn't a lot to load up, so we tossed it in the boat and then decided to head to grab some lunch prior to going out. Treated to a Chicken Tender sub, and he went with the Shrimp Basket, courtesy of Giuseppe's Sub and Pizza. Heading back, we pushed off and headed out into the lake. Anyone want to take a guess where there wasn't any wind? So we floated around for a while. There wasn't even enough wave actions to flog the sails, that's how dead the weather ended up being. I took the opportunity to jump into the water and cool off a few times, and even floated around on a tube and scrubbed down the sides of the boat a little. The starboard side had been pretty dirty so it was nice to get that cleaned. And it's always satisfying to send some spiders into the abyss where nothing but fish await. OH! Speaking of fish, we did notice on the boat loading trip, an interesting one hovering at the dock. I didn't have my camera, but it was one of these:

I had to actually look it up to see what it was, and was surprised to learn that the Spotted Gar is indeed native to Ontario and as of 2016, classified as Endangered. Kinda cool.

We chose to head back in for the evening. It wasn't so much that there wasn't a good spot to anchor nearby with no wind to get us there, but more that this was the weekend of the annual Fair Point summer bash. In true weekender style, I managed to bork up the shift linkage in the outboard as we docked. This is a 9.9 Mercury outboard, with a tiller shift design. I wasn't sure I had turned the motor off in Neutral so I turned it, and CLUNK into reverse it went - never to return. Oh well, we'll deal with that tomorrow. For the time being, the Bash! A great live band, and catered with some good eats. Even a Tiki Bar! They do this every year, but was the first time I was actually going to be at the dock to take advantage of it. So that gave us dinner and entertainment. We headed back to the boat and sat in the cockpit as the stars started to come out. We discovered Mars looking pretty bright - just recently it was the closest it's been in 15 years, so it wasn't too surprising. We also saw a couple floating lanterns go high overhead. And we also saw what we can safely classify as a UFO. Aliens? Who knows, but definitely unknown. It looked quite high in the sky, as if a plane. But was moving relatively quick, to where my dad surmised it might be a satellite flying past. Except as we watched it, we noticed it had a waver in the line it was on. Out over the lake it went, no sound, and disappeared. It was quite strange.

We woke up around 7 Sunday morning. My dad headed to the shower, and I woke up shortly after. Well, no time like the present to tackle this outboard thing. A recent knee injury has me being slightly more cautious (usually) than I normally am with putting weight on it, so I waited for him to get back, and we moved the boat a little, so it was angled in the slip. This brings the stern in a lot closer and allows me to remove the outboard from the kicker bracket from the dock, instead of trying to lift it up over the stern. Then came the long trek up the dock carrying the dumb thing. It's only about 80 lbs or so but it's still a workout. We propped it on the tailgate of his truck and tried to figure out what could possibly be gumming up these works. We first tried to remove the lower unit, thinking maybe something got borked in there. But we couldn't really see anything, and it would only drop about an inch and a half. So we abandoned hope of it being in the lower, and turned our attention back to the linkages under the cowl. The way this works, is there is a cable system from the tiller. This turns a cog wheel thing that not only operates a linkage to the throttle, but then also shifts gear. But for some reason, this sucker wouldn't shift! Finally my dad suggested we unbolt the piece that turns the shift, so we popped that 10mm bolt off, and bingo, instantly let us move things. It looked as if somehow, it skipped a tooth, is the best way to describe it. Here's a parts diagram for this thing, so you can see what I'm talking about:

So on this diagram, the shift assembly is #2 - two pieces that mesh together and turn in concert when the handle moves. There's a nut (#6 on the diagram) on the other end of the bolt that had us a little nervous since there's no way to get to it without removing the whole mess, but we chanced it. After removing the lower section of the shift assembly and re-aligning it, we put it back together and woohoo, we have shifting again! I tightened the bolt, and if I'm honest, I couldn't swear the nut wasn't turning on the other end, but it did feel relatively snug, and there's a bushing that the plastic piece sits over anyway. Back to the boat! Hefted the outboard back onto the bracket, and started the motor, shifted to Forward, yay! Shift back to Ne---no. Nothing. Now we're stuck in Forward. Talk about a "WTF" moment. I pulled the cowl, and that bolt had loosened up almost completely. This let the assembly not give any good bite, and wouldn't shift. I think what happened, looking back, is that when we first put the bolt in, it didn't REALLY get a bite on the nut. But this time, I said well, worth a shot.. and grabbed the wrench and it actually tightened up properly again. Ok, sweet. Problem solved. Until it changed problems.

I started the motor, shifted both directions multiple times, ok, so far so good. Wait.. why is there water pouring from the leg and not out where it should? Sonofa... I jumped onto a YouTube video of someone changing the impeller. There's a long copper tube from the top of the motor, down the leg. Then, there's a rubber sleeve, that slips over that, and then down onto the impeller housing in the lower unit. So what happened, we figure, is when we pulled the lower unit and even though it only got down an inch, it was far enough to dislodge that sleeve off the tube, so when it was running, it was just flooding water up the leg, and not up the tube. I also found the little clip shown in the video, that was holding everything from coming out. So we removed the pin from that, pulled everything down, reassembled properly, and FINALLY, we have water running, we have shifting. We even have a breeze. Away we go!

We had only a light breeze, about 1-2 knots of boat speed leaving the channel into the lake, and headed North for a while, as that's basically where it would take us. The sun was out, hardly any wisp of clouds, but we were moving, and that's what mattered. We chatted for a bit before he retired to the cabin for a nap for a bit. At that point, the wind slowly built up so we had a good 3+ knots of smooth sailing towards the West. After another hour, I decided to swing back around. I had a hunch the breeze was going to subside, and I figured if I turned back, it would mean a shorter motor back into the dock if it came to that. Dad woke up, and we had slowed a little bit, but we did continue making our way East towards the shore, and circled around a larger motor yacht anchored out. As we turned back towards the marina, it started getting pretty fluky on the wind front, so, a mile or so from the channel, we just dropped the sails and motored the rest of the way in. We had a smooth soft landing into the dock, and started unloading. It didn't take too long, and I let him head out while I buttoned the rest up. Overall a nice sunny weekend, and if you take out the no wind on Saturday, and the 2 hours of messing with the motor Sunday morning, it was pretty pleasant. I even took my new little Breeze 4k drone out for a test drive. Well, in the marina. I want to get a feel for it before I take it out and about on the water.

That's Crappy

This past weekend was nice and rainy. What better weather to do some unwanted boat jobs in! My plan back when I was trying to sort out my head issues (not the mental ones, those need more than a weekend), was to remove the existing system and move to a temporary portapotty setup. Ideally I would plumb a new system from scratch, holding tank, etc. Let's recap though, why mine was junk:

The hoses were God-awful. I didn't stuff my nose against them, but even looking at them, there must've been some permeation there. Not to mention that the toilet didn't even actually work. Now maybe it could've been rebuilt.. but why? And on top of that, the plumbing was all wrong anyway. In my particular boat, the holding tank was an old 6 gallon cell, mounted (and loosely at that) under the port side of the rear of the V-berth. I say loosely, as I realized during this project that there should've been a shelf to mount it on, which had since been destroyed and long gone. The intake hose for the toilet wasn't even plumbed to anything, so the only way to have tried to flush would be to dump water in the bowl, either from the sink or cups or something. Not convenient. The tank itself may have been salvageable if not for the giant gaping hole on top that someone shoved some plastic dryer vent hose in an attempt to vent the fumes out. Yeah, duct taping that into a roughly cut gaping hole is SURE to do wonders.

If you're at all interested, here's a link to that youtube fiasco.

So I went up on Saturday, got there in the afternoon. I intended to start working on it then, but then got thinking that for the sake of self-preservation, I would just relax on board until Sunday, and then tackle it. That way I wasn't elbow deep in yucky stuff, and having to leave anything open while I tried to sleep.

So instead, I arranged my new foam that arrived that morning, in the cabin. Nothing covered yet, and I mis-remembered my V-berth size so it's a little on the small side, but it should be a nice change to have actual cushions when I'm done. Saturday night was just spent with some internet surfing, and watching Netflix. Side note: One day of binge-watching Netflix on whatever my auto-bandwidth settings are on, blows through a 15 gig hotspot allowance.

Sunday arrived, and despite my not wanting to get dirty, it was time. I donned my fancy Harbor Freight respirator, and some heavy yellow gloves, and got to work. First step was the head itself. On the Newport 28, there's really no access to the bottom of the shelf that the head sits on. This means that if the bolt starts spinning, you rapidly run out of options. There are three bolts, two on the "bowl" side, and one just under the front of the handle. One nut came off nice and easy. One was more stubborn, and the last, even more stubborn still. But with a combination of jamming a flathead screwdriver under the washer with upward pressure - this pulls the head of the bolt underneath tighter to the underside of the shelf, which adds more friction and ideally would be enough to stop the bolt from spinning while undoing the nut - so I succeeded after a while. I also learned it's surprisingly warm wearing a respirator, even when the temperature is under 70 degrees.

Before I could pull the head out though, I needed to unhook the discharge hose from the holding tank. Now this is where it starts getting disgusting. You can skip to the end if you're squeamish. The hose came off the fitting on the holding tank relatively easy. It also was not empty. This meant I needed to keep the end up high enough to not dump anything in the boat, but not so high that it overflowed the bowl going backwards. In a perfect world, I'd have a cap of some sort to put on the end. It is not a perfect world. I used a copious amount of duct tape to make a "hopefully this is good enough" seal on the end, and laid out a double-layer of trash bags in the head compartment. Pulling the head up, I put it in the bags, and then pulled the hose through the bulkhead quickly enough to get it looped into the bag and all tied off with very minimal um...spillage. The intake hose was no issue, since it wasn't freaking hooked to anything!

The next steps were to try to free the hoses from their places. The hose that went from the holding tank to the manual pump and outward to the discharge thruhull was remarkably stubborn. So much so that I decided to remove the entire assembly - minus the hose that had gone between the pump and thruhull. I had decided to flush that hose with water and so opened the thruhull which started a steady pinhole leak out of the side, on the upper side of the valve. Closing it, no water. Opening, water. So, rather than risk extra strain by yanking on an old hose, that one got a pass to stay. I had to actually remove the cover to the holding tank with the hoses attached. It was a lot of not looking, and a lot of holding my breath out of reflex. After an hour or so, I finally managed to get everything else out, minus that one hose. They were all stuffed into layers upon layers of sealed trash bags, and carefully positioned upright to avoid spillage.

After sponge-cleaning out the rest of the v-berth compartments, the installation of the Dometic was pretty straight forward. I popped the box open, and found myself a nice little surprise. When I had decided this was the model I was going to purchase, I needed to determine which version. They have two colors, and they also have a standard equipment, and an MSD kit version. The latter includes a fitting that replaces the pour-out spout on the holding tank with a cap with fittings for a pumpout hose and vent. My understanding was that the cap replaced the spout in the package, and most forum posts I could find didn't really lead me to think otherwise. And since the price of the version I bought with the MSD kit was so much cheaper than the other, I assumed it couldn't possibly.

I popped the box, pulled it apart and voila! Best of all worlds. The holding tank had the spout cap pre-installed and the pump-out cap sitting quietly in a bag, waiting to be used. I haven't ordered new hose yet as I wasn't sure how long a run I would need, so I left the spout in place to use it as an actual porta unit instead of permanent. The holding clamps are a vast improvement over the plastic ones on my Thetford on the last boat. It didn't take more than ten minutes to lay out the brackets, pre-drill the holes, and screw them down. I did go up another 1/16" on the drill bit size to make it a little easier, which didn't make it any less sturdy.

So now, let's hope we don't need it.

Early Father's Day

June 9-13 I took the week of June 10th off from work, and as luck would have it, the weather looked at the outset to be mostly cooperative for the upcoming days. I spoke with my dad towards the end of last week, and invited him up to the boat to come out sailing. He wasn't going to be able to make it for the weekend, but hoped to come up on Monday perhaps. So with that to hopefully look forward to, I packed up the still-ailing car and drove my way up to the lake. Saturday was a very uneventful day. I did exactly nothing. Well not exactly, but I rounded up. I played online for a bit, and watched some Supernatural on Netflix for a bit. But I did actually do a couple productive things! I repainted the hatch and chain locker cover the same shade of blue that the hull is. I don't think I took a picture afterwards to compare, but through the magic of Paint, I present a before and after:

Yes, you're allowed to laugh at my skill. But anyway, I figured that until I can repaint everything a proper shade of white on deck, at least this makes them look like appropriate accents instead of that faded light blue blandness. I also managed to figure out how to get my $15 USB GPS puck to work with my laptop! Long story short, there's a Virtual Comm Port download that turns your USB device into exactly what it says - a virtual port. Once that's done, just simply select the port in Open CPN (my choice) or whatever you're using, and voila! Had a good solid fix even in the cabin at the table in about ten seconds. More on that a little later.

So Sunday rolled around, and about 9 AM I woke up to a slight breeze. Figuring it would be a nice day out, I decided to back myself out of the slip and head out to sea, er, lake. Now one of the things that I did before departing, was to rig a small line to the topping lift block that was dangling above the mast. I thought if I could make that work, it would be easier than the supporting hook on the backstay when it came time to raise the main. I rigged the jib prior to leaving so I wouldn't have to bounce around on deck, and headed through the channel.

The first thing that happened, was that the topping lift line just went POOF! right through the block, sending it swinging all over (it eventually wrapped around a shroud enough that it stopped). Then it turns out, I ran the starboard jib sheets INSIDE the shrouds, instead of out. I tell you, I was a right old mess out of the gate. But once I got sorted, it was a very long downwind leg to a few miles shy of Sodus Bay before I decided to turn around. The upwind beat back to Fair Haven took a few hours, and gave me a good time to note that the shrouds needed another turn or two on the buckles, and also that I could stand in the companionway on the steps with the tiller extension and avoid a majority of the breeze and spray. Go me! It was a little under six hours from dock to dock, and a shade over 19 miles. I know this because what I DIDN'T know, was that Open CPN will track your trips for ya! How fancy is that?! And it also gives a breakdown along the way, with coordinates, speeds, elapsed times, and the like. Quite impressive, and that's just scratching the surface.

Once I got back to the dock, it was only minutes before my Dad gave me a call to let me know that he'd be able to come up after all. We set a time the next morning for arrival, made a small checklist of goodies to grab, and I buckled in for the evening to get some rest after cleaning the boat up and taking non-essential bits to the car. He arrived around noon-ish, and we had a few hot dogs on the boat, and walked around a little before taking off. The conditions were almost identical to what I had Sunday - average of 10 knots of wind from the Northeast, with some decent swell, but very easy and quick for a downwind run. This time we went down past Sodus, to my favorite little anchorage down there. It's halfway between Sodus Bay, and Fairbanks Point. It's barely a cove, but the wind was forecast to swing Southward so we'd be protected and it's always made for great scenery on the waking hour. As it happened, the swell didn't want to get any better until the very early morning hours, and this new-to-me boat has quite a few creaks and groans. I believe it's in part due to this boat having a liner in the cabin, but regardless, the wind being JUST off-kilter from the waves, would turn us back and forth between a smooth silent moment, and a rolling, groaning one. The anchor held fine with 6:1 scope through the night, even with that ride but by morning, it had calmed to nothingness. And it's just hard to beat a sunset on the lake.

We sailed off anchor (that's a lot of faith in my ability to pull the outboard rope twenty times in succession to get it to start, if something goes wrong), and turned a little West, as I had never actually been further than my little spot. The breeze was just a little puffy here and there but we actually did manage a couple miles before turning back around and heading upwind. It was slow to start, but the wind eventually did shift South, and we had a very nice beam reach, that eventually turned into a close reach, until we got to the marina once again. The reason we ducked back in on Tuesday night, even though he had more time available, was the wind and weather for Wed and Thursday was forecast to increase to gusts up to and over 40 knots. I have faith in my boat and anchor, but I'm also practical. All in all we did about 43 miles down and back, and treated ourselves to a pizza at the local shop for lunch.

The overnight sleep at the dock was quite a contrast to the bounce house we slept in for Monday night, which I'm sure my Dad was grateful for. I've bounced around even at the dock a bit before, and it really was just the creaking that kept me up a little longer than average on that night, but for him, this was the first time overnight on the water this year, and that must've been hard to get used to. Wednesday morning treated us to a pretty stiff Southerly breeze, and a few drops on the window from the night. The big difference was the sea state on the lake - There was more wind, less swell, probably because it was coming FROM a shallow water direction instead of towards it. Brunch was burgers, and then we got him packed up and on the way before the rain started. I took a little longer to get my junk rounded up. I also made the mistake of forgetting where I was. I had the companionway hatch slid closed because it had started raining lightly, so in my hurry to go load some stuff into the car, I grabbed arms full and went to bound up the steps - straight up into the hatch. I sat down rather quick.

It looks worse than it was, I'm sure. I was more annoyed at myself that I forgot about the hatch and felt like an idiot. But I soldiered on and packed up, heading home finally. All in all, it was a pretty great trip. 5 Days on the boat, and some good quality time with Dad along the way.

Since getting home, I did manage to fix the rear axle u-joint on my car, and more importantly, ordered the new Dometic SaniPottie 975MSD for the boat, along with - drum roll please - new foam to make cushions out of! It remains to be seen how well this comes out, but I bought some foam from Thefoamfactory.com which comes pre-cut in the dimensions you wish. They even do V-berth cushions complete with the little notch at the bottom. However, since the notch is off-center for the Newport 28, I opted for just a straight trapezoid shape in the overall size, and I can cut that out after it arrives. I ordered the foam for the V-berth, and two more pieces for the seats in the main cabin. You can also have the pieces pre-wrapped with fiberfill to make your cushions nice and smooth. I still have to order up the material, and then after we see how they come out, there's the quarter berth cushion left, and the seat backs. If I get really daring, maybe cockpit cushions too!

Happy Father's Day to all those out there!