Five months in the shipyard

It is pouring rain today, the relentless remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia. We are under a flood watch here along with much of New York City, and we're more or less pinned on the boat, as we'd get drenched even walking to the shop. That makes it a great day to catch up the blog.

The latest delay. You will notice that this boarding gate and the area around it is a different shade than the rest of the hull. This is the situation at all five gates.

Monday will mark five full months since we arrived here at the shipyard. Notwithstanding the hope I expressed in my last post that we would be out by the end of the month, a full two week delay in the painting has condemned us to pass the five month mark, and I will consider us lucky now if we are out by the end of October. 

One of our nice new latches. The gate was the right color in this photo, but you'll notice the tan stopped short of the gunwale between the gate and the rub rail. This is what they were trying to correct.

In about two weeks we will pass both the 180-day and the six-month mark in New York, which this week sent us scrambling to the New York legislative codes to make sure we're not going to cross some magic tax boundary. Most states do have an exemption for vessels and crew while work is being done in a yard, but in any event we found nothing to suggest we'd have an issue.

Hoisting the mast. It took four burly guys to carry it out to the crane, and four lift attempts before they got the slings positioned properly. I'm standing on our boat deck for this shot.

The cause of the latest delay is that the painting contractor literally disappeared, with no communication, for two weeks. In fact, he had already disappeared by the time I last posted here. We could not reach him, the yard could not reach him, and even his workers were showing up at the yard looking for him. After ten full days of radio silence, the yard finally gave up waiting and assigned another worker to finish the touch-up.

My digs for most of a day after the mast was up, seated cross-legged on that square of plywood working on the radar, which is open in this photo. The plywood is positioned across the cross-members for the soft top.

That proved to have problems of its own, and so when the painter magically re-appeared mid-month, even though everyone was annoyed with him, we all agreed he needed to finish the job. In the meantime, however, the paint ran out, and now we are again delayed waiting on fresh paint from the manufacturer. We have our fingers crossed that the paint shows up this week, and that the color match is acceptable.

The guts of the radar as seen from my new perch. I've already worried this mess of subcables and connectors into the housing through a 1" hole, and now I need to thread them into place. At one point I dropped a tiny screw into the bowels of the housing and had to fish it out with a dab of putty on the tip of a long, skinny screwdriver.

It's not that everything stopped during those two weeks. With both primer and paint on all the metal surfaces, the yard was able to continue installing hardware, including the rest of the rails and the fancy new door latches we bought for the boarding gates. And you may recall we had moved the boat to the east dock next to the rigging crane so they could get the rest of the big and heavy stuff on board.

We've put most of the deck gear back in the lockers, and as I was cleaning up this collection of adapters I arranged it for a photo for one of my boating forums, where I explained how we use them to take on water in some odd places. Clockwise from top: Irrigation quick-connect adapter, 2.5" NST fire hydrant adapter, Y-splitter to share an already occupied spigot, Camco "Water Bandit" adapter for threadless spigots, SingleSeal adapter for hose bibs with damaged threads, four-way water valve key, standard hose bib valve handle.

That included the largest railing, some 30' long, the windlass, and, of course, the mast, now mostly populated with all the gear. This final item took three yard guys and myself, and the paint got dinged up a bit in the process. After it was in place, it took me three full days to finish running all the cables, install the remaining hardware, and connect and test everything.

I was able to make the connections for the anchor and masthead lights inside the new access panel, and so instead of worrying mismatched-gauge wires into heat-shrink crimp terminals I used some of my new lever-lock butt connectors inside a tupperware-type container with a cable gland.

I was very relieved that all the equipment worked once re-installed. That relief was short lived, as I managed to break the integrated cable on the 20 year old dedicated GPS for the radar when we lowered the mast three days later to touch up the paint. We were both so focused on the winching of the mast and not dinging anything up that neither of us noticed that we'd run out of slack on some of the cables, and we stretched this one until it broke internally.

Lever-lock cable block in the pilothouse ceiling for the radar GPS. I had plenty of slack at this end but failed to leave enough of it in the mast.

I slacked up all the cables and tested everything, which all seemed to be working. When we went to move the boat a week later to the west dock, where we are today (map), in order not to be blocked in by the 112' Westport Bravo Zulu that arrived Tuesday, the GPS was inoperative. I spent a day crammed under the helm temporarily patching the radar over to a backup GPS, and I have both a replacement GPS and a shielded cable on order to restore full functionality.

I cut the cable inside the new upper access panel for the mast, where I found the unit to be working, and then I took my meter and some dikes to the bad cable until I found the bad spot. If you look closely you can see the insulation stretched and conductors broken on many of the six insulated wires.

This was a personal low point for me, perhaps the culmination of five months of false starts coupled with annoyance at the painter, who had just re-materialized out of nowhere. I had spent hours carefully removing that integrated cable with the GPS, re-installing it later, re-routing it and reconnecting and testing it, happy to have succeeded in caretaking a decades-old piece of gear, and here in a few seconds of lapsed attention I had undone all that effort. The fix will only have cost me another few hours and a c-note, and in due time will fade from memory, but in the moment it was a punch in the gut.

Our new neighbor, superyacht Bravo Zulu, threading its way through the harbor. It's here for dockage, as there are really no other docks in the harbor for her size.

In the course of all the mast work during this project, I relocated the ComNav satellite compass back to the stanchion on the flybridge coaming that once held the spotlight. This is where I had installed it originally, because it was easy, and I had relocated it to the mast a while back, where I thought it really belonged. I was never able to get it to work right on the mast (long story), and we've had to run the autopilot from the magnetic compass in the interim. I'm hopeful that the relocation will solve the issues, and I used the vacant spot on the mast to reinstall the Ubiquiti Bullet that we use to receive marina WiFi when available.

Ubiquiti router and antenna on the starboard spreader. You can also see our new TPZ camera near the top of the mast. 

Speaking of antennas, our 16 year old SSB antennas were quite worn, with most of the paint gone and the fiberglass not only showing, but starting to break down. Following manufacturers instructions I washed them, put a couple of coats of paint on them, sanded them, and put a finish coat on. They are by no means perfect, but they look a lot better than they did when we arrived. I'll need to replace the cables as well, which were brittle from age and have cracked from all the manipulation during the painting process.

New Starlink mount made from schedule 80 PVC and nicer pipe clamps.

I put the davit crane back together, complete with a new hand controller and connector as well as new gas struts and a new bearing for the sheave. I'm sorry I don't have a photo yet; we opted to leave the boom bare aluminum rather than re-paint it white. It's a little stark right now, but should become less so as the aluminum oxidizes to a duller gray. I also installed the new floodlights on the pilothouse brow, but won't be able to dial them in until we are someplace dark. The yard is anything but.

The painter made a shelter with plastic on the aft deck while he worked on our back door. You can also see our new drop-leaf deck table, an Amazon purchase to replace the round folding table we gave away upon arrival.

Out here at the end of the dock we have been struggling with voltage issues, with all our outlets seeing barely 100 volts. After the UPS running the network and helm electronics quit several times, taking the sub-100 input to be a brownout, it finally occurred to me to just turn off the input to the inverter, letting it make a fully 120 volts from the batteries, and turn on the backup charger to make up the deficit. That worked great until this week, when the dropping outside temperature has had us running our 120-volt heaters much longer. I ultimately deployed our 30-amp shore cord to bring something closer to 120 volts into the inverter/charger.

The Joel Miller, in for repairs to the bow after hitting the rocks, had the enormous heavy-equipment tires that served as stern fenders changed out for some newer ones. I joked that she was in for tire rotation.

After five months of sitting out in the boatyard, the dinghy steering seized up completely and I spent a few hours taking it apart, reaming out the rust, and putting it back together with some fresh grease. And the battery is dead from the parasitic load of the bilge pump, but there's not much I can do about that until it's back in the water and I can run it around.

I reinstalled the flybridge radar/plotter but the screen is so badly damaged now that I will be changing this out shortly for a better unit I picked up on eBay a couple months ago. I needed to use this one for testing because the replacement is not yet programmed for our installation.

In the way of dining we finally made it to the Orienta Beach Club, one of our reciprocal clubs, for dinner in their more casual "Trap Room." The club is very tony, and we could not tour the entire grounds on account of a wedding that had taken over most of the club. The food was good, as was the service. We also hit Rosa Cucina Italiana, which would have been an easy walk from our first AirBnB but had not yet opened until we moved out. It was fine, but there are so many good Italian places here that it has not been worth a repeat visit.

We're not the only ones with a delay. The Bennis, our former neighbor in the paint shed, got her hulls blasted for bottom paint, and they found a lot of the plating was too thin to remain in service. Here you see it being replaced.

And finally, on the social front we had a very nice dinner with Eric and Lauren, who own the other pleasure craft in the yard, a 54' aluminum sailing yacht. Their boat has been under refit in the yard for two years now, which gives us some perspective about our five months. And we had a great meet-up over lunch with long-time friends Stacey and Dave, who dropped by en route to one of Dave's gigs.

Stacey snapped this photo as Dave and I were conversing in the inclined storage shed for the marine railway. Photo: Stacey Guth.

All we are waiting on now is final touch-up, including re-painting around all the boarding gates. Even if we had the paint, nothing can be done in this kind of weather anyway, and so we're here until the confluence of fresh paint, dry weather, and the painter's availability.

My beloved beer store, Half Time, inaccessible and starting to be inundated.

Update: After wrapping up my typing we hit high tide, and despite the pouring rain we decided to brave the elements to see just how bad things are in town. Besides, we had packages to pick up at the office. Below are a series of photos I took in an hour's walk around town. I could not get to the worst sections, because even in my watermen's boots, it was too deep to proceed further.

Mamaroneck River at the Tompkins Avenue bridge.

I was not the only one out taking video.

This SUV got towed out of the flood waters onto the sidewalk by a pickup truck with that big yellow strap. Zoom in to see the water gushing out the driver door. There was a lot more than that but I could not get my phone out fast enough.

Our old neighborhood, near our last AirBnB. This flooded intersection was as close as I could get.

Columbus Park, completely inundated, as seen from the train station. That's a pedestrian bridge over the Sheldrake.

The business in town that outfits all the police cars for most of the local agencies moved their entire stock of new cruisers to higher ground across the avenue. I'm guessing they have a deal with the local PD not to get cited for overstaying the time limits.

The river is flowing over the banks and into the parking lots and lower levels of several local businesses and homes.

First cruise!

Just over a week ago we crossed the four-month mark here at Derecktor Shipyard in Mamaroneck. It's been a long project, and it feels like an eternity since we were out cruising. Apart from a couple of weekends where we traveled to see friends and family, I've really not taken any time off, and I'm pretty tired. Today is a rain day, so I am taking time off to catch up on the blog.

Vector in her new digs on the rigging dock. It was a tight squeeze behind the NY Waterways ferry Brooklyn, newly arrived for her refit.

A lot has happened in the two and a half weeks since I last posted here, and we are asymptotically approaching the finish line. Sadly, painting has not been chief among those activities; we have not seen the painters in a full week now, and various things are now held up waiting on them. While the painting punch list is as long as my arm, they really ought to be able to hammer it out in a week or so if we can get some dry weather.

One of the last shots I snapped on the hard, shortly after the sign installer finished adding the name and hailing port.

The yard really needed to get us in the water, because they need the hard stand area for other vessels coming in. And so it was that they made a full-court press to finish all the work that could only be done on the hard. They finished up the stabilizer service and got the fins back on, finished the second coat of bottom paint, audio-gauged the hull in five places, and put the swim platform back on the boat.

For my part in the process I re-installed the anchor snubber on a new shackle, and gave the propeller four coats of 99% zinc paint. This latter item is sold by chandlers as barnacle barrier prop paint for $40 a can, but I use Rustoleum Cold Galvanizing Compound, which is the exact same stuff, that I get at Home Depot for $10 a can. I had to make an after-dinner run to Home Depot for a fresh can.

Prop coated in zinc paint.

The big push from both sides almost got us to the water on the first of the month, but the yard just ran out of week and we ended up spending Labor Day weekend still on the hard. I worked through the weekend, mostly re-installing equipment on the mast, which is still lying on its back in the shed. The yard cut the access hole I had requested just before the week was out. It was well into the 90s here and my progress over the weekend was correspondingly slow.

New access hole. If you peer inside you can see why I wanted it; all the cables to both spreader arms come through the square hole beneath, previously unreachable.

When the yard resumed work on Tuesday they were able to finish up the swim step and get most of the boarding gates back on, a task much more easily done from the scissor lift on the hard than from ladders on the dock. And Wednesday they put us back in the water, which involved lifting Vector high enough to swing her over the aft decks of the nearby Joel Miller before gently lowering her four stories back down to the water. A short time-lapse video of most of the flight is at the end of this post.

When I was not working on the mast I spent most of my time continuing to install hardware on the boat. That included installing the new fittings and hose for the main engine raw water intake. I had hoped to leave these off until the yard had a chance to do some remediation in the bilge below it, but the yard wanted us to be ready to maneuver.

She flies through the air, with the greatest of ease. Swinging over the Joel Miller.

The yard, too, has spent most of their time re-installing gear, including the aforementioned gates, all the cleats and hawsepipes, the rails, and various latches and hardware. We changed to new latches on the boarding gates to replace the now-unobtainium models that have been failing one by one over the years, and the yard fabricated some plastic shims and stops for various gates and doors.

Once we were back in the water I set to work on re-starting and checking the main engine, generator, and watermaker. The main engine exhaust outflow seems less vigorous than previously, so I drained the raw water system and inspected the impeller. It was fine, and I'm pretty sure my new hose work is fine, so I am now thinking that this is due to all new wet exhaust hose that the yard installed between the muffler and exhaust outlet. The old hose, now two decades old, was in bad shape and had lots of crud in it; a partial occlusion would account for more pressure in the outflow.

All these seats, outside benches and inside buckets, were removed from Brooklyn and are destined for the scrap heap. This is just a small portion of them.

The generator, thankfully, started right up and began making power, the only time we've had 120 volts at our outlets since arriving. I still have very slow oil and fuel leaks that I need to address but I doubt I will get to them here. The low yard voltage, by the way (208 nominal but as low as 202 at some outlets), has caused the UPS running the chart computer to switch to battery power, and then deplete it, more than once, which we learn when our Internet, which is on the same UPS, goes out. The jury is out on the watermaker until I actually try making water, which I don't want to do here in the harbor.

In a sort of busman's holiday (a term we used a lot when we lived on an actual bus), I took a day off two Sundays ago, hopped on Amtrak's Northeast Regional, and headed up to New London to help my friend Tim sort out an electrical issue on his sailboat. Amtrak does not stop in Mamaroneck, so to avoid changing trains I rode my scooter down to the New Rochelle station and parked in the garage for a buck an hour.

Whale Tail fountain, across from the train station in New London, CT.

Tim has something of a background in solar energy, having been a solar and off-grid aficionado since before it was popular, and his sailboat has an impressive solar energy system, enough to meet most of their needs without running a generator. On days of high insolation but low electrical demand, he'd like to be able to use the excess solar to heat his water heater or run cabin air conditioning, but undocumented modifications to the boat's main electrical panel on a previous owner's watch were standing in the way. I found they had literally sawed through one of the copper bus bars and wired the inverter across the gap; it was a simple fix once we figured it out, and we did not even need any extra parts.

s/v Paquita's electrical panel. The cut busbar is nearly invisible below the mass of wiring.

Speaking of Tim's panel reminds me of some panel work of my own. As long as we were painting the whole boat, I may have mentioned that I removed all the old surface-mount deck lights on the aft and side decks, which each had an individual switch connected to a circuit that was always hot. The yard filled in the old holes and I cut new holes for modern recessed LED fixtures. These have no switches and I needed a way to turn them on and off. I also needed a new circuit for the forward-facing floodlights we're adding to spot pot floats at night.

Cutout for new electrical panel. Curved dip toward the left is what's left of a hole for a voltmeter.

Both of these things required new circuit breakers on our main panels at the helm, and I've long since used up all the spares. I bought a three-circuit panel to add three more 24-volt breakers to the six already in place, which just fits in the remaining space on the console. An old-school rectangular analog voltmeter was in that spot, something I installed a decade ago to monitor the thruster and windlass batteries, but which never really fit right and could not be read in the dark.

New panel installed, with something we've not had for a while: "Spare." Blue tape is tagging out breakers that now go to loose wires while equipment is still missing.

I spent close to an hour cutting the fiddly hole with odd corners needed for the new panel, to include hacking out part of a vertical support behind the panel for clearance. After some judicious re-arranging of circuits we now have separate switches for the flood lights and the deck lights, and I even now have a spare 24v breaker position. The thruster and windlass battery voltage is now displayed on a much smaller meter in between the controls for those systems.

New meter for thruster/windlass batteries, better positioned to monitor the voltage drop while operating either motor. My shutter was too fast to capture the display.

The yard asked us to move by tomorrow over to the rigging dock, which is accessible by a much smaller crane which will be used to re-install our mast, the longest railing on the boat, and our own davit crane as each of those items is ready. And with the boating season rapidly drawing to a close here, we also needed to get our waste tank pumped out. And so it is that this morning, just before high tide, before the harbor got busy, and before the rain started, we set out on our first "cruise" since arriving at the shipyard on May 2.

This "wedding cake" cutout is from installing the meter. I had to drill a smaller hole from the top of the panel to fit the meter, and a larger concentric hole from the bottom for the nut that holds it on, as no threads would protrude from the full 1" thickness of the 1/4" finished surface on top of 3/4" plywood support.

Without the mast and thus most of our instruments, I had to cobble together some backup data sources, and record our mileage on a backup odometer. But it is a short trip of just about a mile to the pumpout dock in the next basin, and mostly navigable visually at high tide. After four months we are both out of practice, and I read the checklists aloud as we started up and got under way.

We had to land at the pumpout dock twice. Our first time, I passed the dock, turned around, and came back to tie up on the port side, where our fitting is, as we had done last time. But that was before the season started, when few boats were yet in the water. To get the hose to reach, we had hung out over the end of the dock by a fair amount. Now there was a boat moored there, with its outboard engine keeping us from backing that far.

Pointy outboard motors and new paint do not go together, so we could not overhang this dock to tie on our port side.

Fortunately, after turning the boat around yet again and tying on the starboard side in exactly the right spot, the hose just barely reached the fitting after pulling it across the deck. We did our best not to drag it too much against the new paint. When we finished we came straight here to our new digs at the rigging dock (map). We walked next door for a celebratory brunch at the diner, where I was disappointed that blue laws kept me from enjoying a mimosa in the morning. I've had several there, and they are quite good, but apparently we've never stopped in on a Sunday before.

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and if we can just get the painter to finish up we should be out of here before the end of the month. Any fantasy we had harbored of cruising further east or north this season has now been shattered, and whenever we shove off here we will be headed back the way we came. I hope we have time for a stop in the city before making our way south along the eastern seaboard.

Time lapse of Vector being hoisted from the hard stands to the floating docks.

Nineteenth Nomadiversary

Today we are celebrating 19 years of living a nomadic life. Our good friend Ben coined a term for this: today is our 19th nomadiversary. That said, we hardly feel nomadic right this minute, as we are two thirds of the way through our fourth month in this spot.

Vector being lowered into position in the yard, before the blocks have been set. She was nose-down for the hoist, because they used a larger frame that could also handle the landing craft.

Even though today was a work day and I am getting a late starting typing, I did not want to miss the opportunity to post on the actual date. While 19 is not such a round number (next year's the big one, right?)  the truth is that another year is never guaranteed, and this year is something of a watershed anyway. We celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary just after arriving here at the boatyard (official 20th anniversary gift: topside paint), and we just crossed the decade mark in the boat earlier this year.

One of my last projects while waiting to be able to start re-installing hardware: cleaning up the pilothouse door latches.

Lots has happened in the three weeks since my last post. The bulk of the painting was finished over the following week. With the delay in getting additional paint, the yard relented and allowed us to move back aboard, even before we were towed out of the shed. I rigged up a gray water discharge hose to a floor drain and we moved back in to a very dusty boat that Thursday.

Shower discharge adapter, connected to an old garden hose the yard gave us. If you zoom in you can see a siphon break valve I had to add because the hose was siphoning the sump dry, causing the pump to air lock. The string keeps the weight of the hose from yanking the adapter out.

Louise had come down with some kind of crud (not Covid, according to the tests she took) that had her out of commission for a few days. That included the night the excellent Bruce Springsteen tribute band, Tramps Like Us, performed at the free concert in Harbor Island Park. I ended up going stag, on our very last night in the AirBnB. The next morning and well into mid-day we made four trips on the scooters to move everything back aboard.

Springsteen cover band Tramps Like Us at Harbor Island Park. They were quite good.

The painters have been working mostly in the evenings and sometimes overnight, in part due to their own schedules and in part because painting our boat and grinding/blasting/painting on the ferry in the paint shed with us are incompatible and had to happen at staggered times. The end result was that the night they painted the decks, we needed to be off the boat so we would not be trapped in the shed with the paint fumes.

A familiar boat name atop a stack of fresh decking.

I have gobs of Hilton points, in no small part due to putting a giant deposit toward our yard bill on my Hilton AmEx card. The closest Hilton property is in Yonkers (and the closest decent hotel of any stripe is in White Plains), a half-hour scooter ride in the dark. We opted instead for a Hampton Inn in Stamford, Connecticut, which is a pleasant half-hour train ride with a three-quarter mile walk at each end. We went into downtown for a beer at the local Irish pub, but otherwise it was just an overnight sleep stop and we did not spend any time in town. We lingered over the free breakfast in the morning, as the yard texted to say the decks were still curing.

Stamford has more than one of these signs. This one is at Gateway Commons near the train station. That's the "Stamford Cone" in the background.

The following week, and with most of the spraying over and done with, the yard winched Vector out of the shed and then flew it over to where we are now, next to the crane and the old marine railway. Done or not we had to be out, as the 75', Korean-war era landing craft that arrived the same day needed to be spotted where it would block the tracks from the shed. That boat will be here to November and we certainly did not want to be trapped in the shed that long.

I've just re-installed the windows and dogs on the newly painted doors.

I tried to make time-lapse videos of the winch-out and the crane movement, but I set the delay a bit long and so the clips, at the bottom of this post, are short and very fast. However, they give you a sense of it. When they flew the landing craft in next to Vector, the boom was right over our salon. A bit nervous-making, especially if you watch any of those "crane fail" video clips on YouTube.

Spotting the William Weit, a 1955 ex-Navy "Landing Craft, Mechanized" (LCM) next to us. The crane boom is right over us.

They needed to get us moved and that boat hauled last Friday because both crane operators are on vacation this week. I expected the landing craft to be the last lift, but then they hauled a workboat out and spotted it right behind us. It turned out they had hit the rocks in New Haven at 4:30am and had called for an emergency haulout. Later in the week the Coast Guard investigation team was on board for the Marine Casualty investigation.

Work boat that struck rocks and put a hole in the bow off New Haven, being inspected by USCG.

Being outside in the yard has been more pleasant for us, but has complicated things for the painters, who are trying to wrap up their touch-up and other finishing touches in an uncontrolled environment. They've done a couple of all-nighters already while we were asleep belowdecks. A couple of days ago a large chuck of fairing and finished paint came off while the rub rails were being installed, and the painter had to re-coat a large swath of bow in challenging conditions.

This 4" diameter chunk came off while they were fitting rub rails. The gray primer revealed after the failure suggests a bonding problem with the fairing compound.

I started the process of re-installing hardware shortly after my last post, starting upstairs on the flybridge, where the paint was already fully cured. Reinstalling the instrument panel, instruments, and controls took three solid days, including the very tedious process of cleaning out all the threaded holes for the fasteners, now occluded by paint and fairing compound. I did take the opportunity for a massive clean-up of hoses, cables, and wires that are difficult or nearly impossible to access with the panel in place.

Cleaning threads out from the inside. I had to modify a tap handle to fit.

Happiness is having the first complete item re-installed on the boat -- the Kahlenberg horns. And the new paint is so shiny you can see their reflection.

It's been an endless procession of hardware installation since, each piece involving more thread cleanup and struggling to keep sealant and bedding compound from getting everywhere on the freshly painted surfaces. I've given up on keeping it off my clothes, and I'm just careful not to brush into anything. Every day there is a new McMaster-Carr or Amazon order for something that turns out to be needed to complete the job.

I'm trying out these lever-lock butt connectors for my NMEA junctions as part of the wiring clean-up.

It was something of a scramble to get all the openings in the boat sealed up before the first rain. That included a portlight that had to be removed after one of the yard guys inadvertently drilled several holes through the polished stainless frame from outside the boat; the yard removed it, welded all the holes and polished it to the point where you can't tell by looking that there was ever a problem. The painter and I got the flybridge hatch to the pilothouse put back on, and I reinstalled the access plates into the mast.

You should not be seeing light through holes around this portlight. A worker trying to install outside trim drilled right through it.

I thought we were ready, but neither one of us had been thinking about all the little holes in the boat deck for yet-to-be-mounted equipment. When the rain did come, I went to the engine room to start a pump for the water I knew would be coming in to the tiller flat through the missing hatch, and I was surprised to find water raining down from the saloon, which had been dry when I walked downstairs.

I had carefully taped the underside of all the holes to stave off problems, but the blasting gun went right through my tape. Above this ceiling panel we found a small mountain of blasting sand, topped with a dollop of fairing compound. Rain had saturated the whole mess and a good bit of the ceiling panel as well.

Water had been running through mounting holes in the boat deck, into the walls, down to the floor, under the subflooring and across the metal deck and thence into the engine room through a cable penetration. I went out in the downpour with a roll of tape to plug the leaks, and then we had to excavate through the giant piles of equipment in the saloon to get under the settee to dry it all out. We cranked the AC up to "stun" and set up every fan we own to blow dry air through everything. Lesson learned, and as soon as it was dry outside I re-installed the scooter mounting hardware, whose dozen holes were partly to blame.

Getting the scooter chocks and their padeyes mounted closed up a dozen holes.

Things continue to grind along here; the yard has been reinstalling the hawsepipes, rub rails, and deck rails. I asked them to expedite the rail whose mounting holes had been responsible for some of the rain intrusion, and it was on before today's downpour. I am hopeful that the bottom painting and stabilizer work will be done shortly and that we can go back in the water sometime next week. There is still plenty of work left, and we'll be here into September. I'm looking forward to being nomadic once again, when it will be time to head south.