Last minute marathon as usual

Aside from the final coats of paint, we were waiting on a replacement traveler with line control for the car to arrive.  It seemed to take forever, but eventually did arrive.  This product is advertised as a direct replacement, custom bent to your arc, custom screw hole locations.  It arrived and not only was the arc off, the screw holes were off, and it was so tall that the existing 6 inch bolts were too short to even be visible in the holes in the ceiling.  Our traveler mounts to a beautiful piece of teak. You can see it in the photo below. Our initial thought was to shave the teak down about 3/4 of an inch to the top of the sea cover, and then drill out the holes in the traveler another 3/4 of an inch to get the length needed for the bolts to come all the way through.  These two tasks are somewhere at the very bottom of my list of "shit I really don't want to do." 

It took many passes with an electric hand-planer eating up that teak.  Beautiful wood chips everywhere. We got off what we needed to remove, but we definitely still needed another 1/2-3/4 of an inch.  As we were taking the new traveler to the drill press I noticed that the holes in the bottom of the traveler are significantly larger than the holes in the top -- if we had drilled through the top, the screws would have had nothing to hold them in.  Full stop.  We went back to the boat in a panic.  Had we shaved off the teak for no reason? Now what?  McMaster Carr only had the bolts in this size up to 6 inches.  We started calling machine shops, screw manufacturers, welders, etc. This went on for two days before someone pointed out that we could get slotted head stainless bolts in a slightly lower grade than what we had been searching for in 7 inch lengths.  Sometimes you get so caught up in panic that you can't see what is right in front of you.

Meanwhile, we had purchased a new anchor -- finally -- something a little more modern than the hinged plow anchor we had been struggling with.  We went with a Rocna in 33 pound size -- naturally the tang is too tall to fit in our anchor roller correctly as there is a flat pin across the front end of it.

We tried a stainless boom bail but it was a hair too wide.  Compressing it in the shop vise just resulted in breaking the thing.  Ultimately we went with aluminum strapping, it didn't need to be stainless, just keep the anchor and line from jumping the roller. That came out surprisingly well and now the anchor hangs down correctly in the roller.

An after work emergency trip down to the boat was required once the new 7 inch machine screws arrived for a late night hectic installation of the traveler.  It was going fine until it got dark and we couldn't see where the caulking was anymore.  It is on now but we do have some cleanup to do. Matt was able to launch after a further marathon of last minute jobs.  As a side note there was a bird's nest and four little eggs in the bimini cover. :(

The first weekend out was a success, I daresay.
We got in some light sailing, which was great just to make sure what we needed to work on or adjust.



We rescued a sizeable bunch of balloons out of the water.



And I tried out my new stand up paddleboard.