Wedding bells

Just a quick update here from our hotel in lovely Colorado Springs, Colorado.  After last week's gargantuan post, I am trying very hard not to get so far behind again.  That said, it was a short week for us, because we left the yard mid-day on Thursday to travel here for our niece's wedding, the second family wedding in less than a month.

We absolutely love this part of the country, and this is a perfect time of year to visit.  Frankly, we had hoped to be here in Odyssey, after first spending a week in Louisville, Kentucky at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. It would have made a nice three week or so trip, a break from the east coast.  But, alas, it was just not in the cards, with the sheer amount of work going on aboard Vector and the need for us to be there nearly full time.

We kept the option open as long as we could.  When we arrived at the boat yard in early May, we had an estimate of 30 days or so for the work we wanted to have done.  Mentally I added 50%, which would have taken us to late June, and so we thought perhaps we might be done, or close enough to done, in time to start such a trip.  Various hiccups along the way have moved the timeframe out beyond two months, and we will consider ourselves lucky to be out of the yard by mid-July.

Shortly after we returned from our last excursion, to Charlotte, we conceded defeat on General Assembly or taking Odyssey to Colorado, and I started working on booking travel arrangements.  Waiting that long meant we paid something of a premium on flights, and had a smaller selection.  We ended up flying Richmond to Denver by way of Atlanta, with an inexpensive rental car at this end.  As usual I am using Hilton points for our hotels, which only left us with the problem of getting to the airport in Virginia.

Fortunately, another couple who have been on the hard with us at the yard, and are now back in the water at the marina, have a car and offered to drive us to the airport.  They are still in the process of wrapping up work and outfitting their boat, and we offered them the mattress which we have removed from the master stateroom.  It's orthopedic foam and they intended to cut it down to use on their berths.  Unfortunately, signals got crossed somewhere in the yard, and the boatyard staff took the mattress to the dumpster instead of to their boat.  We were miffed -- it was a very, very nice mattress, and there are many ways we might have recycled it had this nice couple not expressed interest.  The yard has since apologized, but it was an upsetting episode nonetheless.

The reason why we removed the mattress from the boat in the first place is that we are cutting the master berth down to queen size, 60" wide, from the oddball custom size (67" wide) to which it was built.  That was actually a much longer-term project, something we might have tackled long after leaving this yard, but it turned out that we had to completely disassemble the berth, all the way down to the floor, so that the boatyard could get to the manhole for the midships fuel tank as well as access the bilge immediately to its starboard.  We were surprised to learn that the berth was not attached to the floor in any way, held in merely by gravity, with only the carpet tackstrip on either side limiting lateral motion.

Only one piece of finish joinery, at the foot of the bed, will need to be modified to narrow the berth, and we've asked the yard's carpenter to do this finish work.  I'll cut the 7" out of all the other lateral pieces, which will still leave just enough room under the berth for the existing drawers in either side to be re-installed without changes.  While we will miss the extra width in the bed, having those 7" in the aisles instead, nearly unusably narrow now, will be a welcome relief.  Also, we'll be able to use off-the-shelf queen linens.



Friday I received an email from the yard saying the new propeller shaft had arrived, with a photo attached.  We can now see the light at the end of the tunnel; with the shaft in hand we can start plugging the last of the holes in the boat in preparation for splashing her.

I need to wrap this up; as a postscript we are now in the Denver airport waiting to board, even though I started this post Saturday.  We should be back home this evening; I've rented a car in Richmond which we will keep for a few days to get some further-afield shopping done.  With a little luck, we should be back in the water in a week or so.