It’s been a very busy week!

We’ve been in Florida a week now and we’ve done tons of work! Our Airbnb has been fantastic – a wonderful place to return to after a day of hard work! We had a few jobs to complete before we went back on the water and we’re pretty close to finishing them all!

At the end of last season, we had a survey of our boat done for our insurance. A survey is like having a home inspection done before you purchase. Our insurance requires a survey every 5 years and last April was our time. We had a very good surveyor examine every part of our boat and he came up with 3 items that needed to be fixed before we went back in the water. 1. Repair the crack in the port side davit (davits are supports that hold, raise and lower our dinghy in and out of the water). 2. Replace 2 broken through hulls on the sea chest. Through hulls (as the name suggests) allow water into the boat through the sea chest. This water goes to our toilets, the engine, the air-conditioner, the fridges – basically anything in our boat that requires water for cooling or flushing! 3. Clean the bilge a bit better.

Okay it’s super important to get all the survey items completed before launch!! Mark started our work week (from hell 😁) getting the davit ready for repair. We had a welder come on Tuesday – he repaired the crack and also added a gate at the stern! This gate will make it easier for Mark to get onto the boat after the dinghy is secured in the davits. The welder was excellent and he did the repair and new gate opening in about 2.5 hours!! Job 1 done!!

The next job Mark moved on to was the replacement of the through hulls. This turned out to be a beastly job! It was the handles of the through hulls that were broken but removing the 40 plus year old valves turned out to be a huge challenge!!! Mark spent several hours working on their removal and finally had success after using a heat gun and some large wrenches. We went to a marine store in St. Augustine to buy new valves and this job was completed by Thursday!! 2 jobs done! The last job – bilge cleaning can be done while we’re in the water so no big rush for this one. Mark has other out of the water jobs that he is currently working on – cleaning and waxing the hull, adding our new name decals and installing our new wind, depth and speed meter (part of it needs to be placed in a through hull).

While Mark was working on these survey requirements, I decided to refinish the interior teak. We’ve had some water damage to the interior teak over the years and with our long Covid storage that damage had become very obvious, especially around our port lights. That area was in desperate need of refinishing so I thought it would be good to do as much of the interior teak as possible – big mistake!! Man our boat has a lot of interior wood and my poor aching arm muscles are proof of that!!! I started stripping and sanding the main cabin on Monday. It’s now Saturday night and the varnishing is almost completed! It’s been a long strenuous job but in the end our main cabin will look awesome!!

It’s now Saturday night! We move out of our Airbnb tomorrow morning and move onto a boat in disarray!! The main cabin is still a mess but the aft cabin is clean and ready for sleeping!! We’re super hopeful that the boat will be splashed on Monday but at the latest Tuesday!! We’ll continue to work on projects but at a less feverish pace! Very much looking forward to that!!