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.