Life on the Hard

Friday May 12, Matt headed down a bit early, left his car at the marina two and a half hours away, and caught a ride back up to our yacht club with a friendly club member.  He was able, using the tail of a halyard, to straighten up the spreaders.  It took loosening the upper stays, and then pulling them up with the halyard or down with the flag halyard and then sighting from the stern, but it worked out nicely.  Even the spreader boots cooperated. 

Saturday May 13 we set out pretty early.  It was cold, raining, and windy but the wind was blowing straight down the bay right to our destination.  The plan was to head down to Lake Ogleton and drop anchor instead of going all the way into Annapolis Harbor and paying for a mooring.  We said a little prayer and tried to start the engine.  She has never enjoyed starting in cold weather, and since she has no glo plugs and a sticky piston it's always kind of a crap shoot what is going to happen.  90 seconds of cranking and staring at each other and it finally fired up.  After that we were too afraid to turn it off so we just motor-sailed the whole way down.  

We took turns hiding inside to try to warm up. Here's my view.  

I made some rather mediocre grilled cheeses under way and we ate them soggily.  

We made the bridge by mid afternoon and decided to go the rest of the way into Annapolis anyway and get a hot dinner in a heated restaurant.  

Iron Rooster - my fave in town now.  

 Then the next morning we only had a three hour leg left to do so we slept in a little and took the kids for a dinghy ride.

Then we headed south again, while Matt worked on putting some things to right inside including re-hanging the ceiling paneling we had to take down to work on the traveler and sea cover.

Cruised behind Thomas Point Light and into Herring Bay.


We wended our way up the narrow channel and into a slip that was creepily close to the marshy bank.  We got the lines tied on just as the wind picked up pretty hard and started screaming through the rigging.  The marina staff showed up to help after that. There she is in her slip.  We think maybe she scraped the dock a bit after we left, so thanks for the look out marina staff, we clearly didn't know how to tie up properly . . .  I bet there's black bottom paint on the dock there now.

 It took until Wednesday for the yard to finally haul her -- we called a few times and were a pain so I think it might have been longer if not for that.  Squeaky wheel, that's us.  This yard is all gravel, no trees. The marina is ridiculously nice with landscaping that would give Sailing Emporium a run for their money.  Everything is far too fancy and monstrously expensive.  They have their own dog park, restaurants, west marine, at least three separate lift wells of varying sizes, and you basically need a car to get from one end to the other.  The best thing though is a free cycle bin that they have by one of the dumpsters.  You can leave unwanted items that are too good to be trash there, and take anything you see that you can use.

Here's the princess in her throne. 

All that gravel is dusty.  Every car that drives by arrives and departs in a cloud of gray dust.  I don't know how serious painters/varnishers can accomplish anything in this yard.  So on the 20th we did a few things -- worked on the coaming compartments a bit with some more thickened epoxy, I touched up the boot stripe where the old lift at the club chewed it up pretty badly, touched up with Poli Glow where I had missed a couple of spots, and then I decided to do an experiment and I put poli glow on the boot stripe to try to inhibit mud and algae from sticking to it.  I'll report back at the end of the summer. 

My galley foot pump had refused to work in the water so I pulled that out and found a plug of bay water scum in the hose, which smelled amazing by the way.  The hose was probably original. It was a soft rubbery material without any reinforcing fibers so I got to take it to the on site West Marine and give it to some poor kid and make him cut me replacement hose. The foot pump appears to be incredibly old but when I put water into the intake and worked the pump it pumped water out of the outlet quite effectively so it's going back in.  I cleaned it out inside and inside and reinstalled it with the new hose.  I can't tell if it will leak when we go back in the water.  There's got to be a way to test that.  

I took apart the kludged shower drain assembly as well and found the problem with that -- the impeller in the pump was adhered completely to the chamber lid.  No wonder the poor thing didn't work.  

Matt worked on the wiring, installing two deck glands for the new mast wiring, and he pulled down the rest of the ceiling in the vee berth, putting up backing wood for the new ceiling to go up next weekend.  Unfortunately the old teak frame around our forward hatch appears to be too soft and uv damaged to go back in.  It must have suffered greatly from the light being magnified by the acrylic hatch.  We have some salvaged teak from a demolished boat that we can use to replace it, Having the frame off and being able to look at the cross section of the deck though was  bit distressing.  More rot.  Whoever installed these hatches didn't do much of a job to remove the old ones, they cut it off leaving the original nuts and bolts and washers in place.  Lazy and gross.