This week has been winter break for the kids. The county we live in has a unique school schedule in that they go to school earlier in the year than other schools but they get a week of essentially once every 6 weeks throughout the school year. It's a pretty nice schedule if you want to do fun things with the family! We were initially going to go to FL for the week but realized at the last minute that the water in the Treasure Island area would be too cold for the kids to swim so we quickly came up with a plan B this past Saturday morning. We have rented some great cabins in the Nantahala mountains of western NC and they are always fun...hot tub, great views, pool table inside, very nice place! So we rented a cabin for 3 days. I used to live a few miles away while I was in grad school at Western Carolina University so we know the area well. We had a great, great time. We took the kids hiking on (my beloved!) Appalachian Trail (trivia fact for those reading this blog that you may or may not know...I have hiked the entire 2,160 mile A.T. from Georgia to Maine not once but twice). We brought our dog with us this week so she got to go hiking as well. Here is everyone at one of the shelters about a mile from the Nantahala Outdoor Center:
And yes, a nice glass of wine on our last night there, taken before hopping in the hot tub and star gazing!
But hey, we are here to talk boating, right? We came down to the boat yesterday (Wednesday) after a lovely drive from the cabin cutting through some great backroads. One system I had not yet tested on the boat was something that I could wait no longer to try out. What critical system is this you may ask? Yes- you are right- the OVEN! We baked a pizza for dinner last night and had a blast doing it. Next I shall have to test it again and bake some brownies. The cooktop we knew worked fine but I had to test out the oven with pizza:
And no visit to the boat would be complete without some projects. I can't remember if I had posted about it or not previously but the first day we were leaving Iuka, MS to bring the new boat to Chattanooga, and in fact within seconds of firing up the engines to go, the base of the pilothouse helm chair had cracked. The entire assembly is all metal except for the one piece that attaches the seat to the post. Needless to say it made for a wobbly journey. Here is the offending broken piece:
A matching metal base at same bolt pattern could not be found so I had to have a metal mounting plate fabricated to match the bolt pattern of the seat and another bolt pattern for the new metal base I had bought online. A friend of mine was gracious enough to fabricate the metal plate for me via his company's machine shop:
And all attached! I am happy to no longer have a rocking chair for a pilothouse helm chair. :)
That was the easy project. This next one...a bit more work. While our 45 has just a fraction of the exterior teak our trawler had, the teak was in bad shape. It looked like it had leprosy. It was pealed up everywhere, discolored, poorly applied, etc. Unfortunately it was so far gone the only real option was to strip it all down and start over. Here is what the toe rail looked like earlier today:
And after about 5.5 hours with a heat gun and scraper, this is what it looks like now:
I am nowhere near done with the teak obviously. All I have done is get the old finish off and take it down to bare wood. Now I will have to go back and sand it to get it all to a uniform color (some is faded grey, some is not, etc.) and smooth it all out to prep for new varnish. I think I am going to go with Epiphanes "wood finish clear." I used it on our trawler and liked the results and it can be built up without having to sand between coats and you can do multiple coats per day. The cockpit combing is varnish free right now but all greyed out so I will also have to sand it down to clean wood and then we will varnish it all with probably 8-10 coats. Yes....this is going to take a while!
Last night was the first night my wife and daughter had spent the night aboard so it has been a lot of fun. We are cleaning and organizing (it seems I am not the best at cleaning the inside like I thought I had haha) and seeing what works best for storing everything. Depending on the weather tomorrow we hope to cruise around a little bit and have fun on the river but we will see what the weather brings. If it is not good I ordered a new solenoid for the dinghy davit winch as it seems to only want to spool in one direction and not the other. I am hoping it is just the solenoid but we shall see.
Our general to do list in case you are curious:
1) Get davit winch working.
2) Refinish exterior teak.
3) Big compound and wax for hull and topsides.
4) Rebed everything on the flybridge to make sure no issues. We had no leaks during our (rainy) delivery trip but I'd rather be proactive.
5) Scrub and clean the engine room- this will be a "man weekend" for just my son and I...pretty sure my wife and daughter will not see the fun in this task!
6) Haul out for insurance survey. We want to adjust our insurance so we need to do a haul out and full survey on the boat. It will be interesting to see the bottom as we did not haul out prior to purchasing it as we were very comfortable with what we were buying.
Stay tuned....
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