It’s been a busy weekend on Crimson Kathryn and on the docks. Saturday saw the departure of our friends Julian and Brad on Alizarin. They left the floating docks around 9am on what turned out to be a lovely (not raining) day. 2 hours later, our other friends on the floating docks, Jane and Steve on Daydreams II, threw off their lines and headed out. It was tough to see them go but they were both heading to St. Augustine so we knew we’d see them soon.
We had a very busy work day on Saturday. As I mentioned previously, we’ve been having this ongoing leak on the port side and Mark asked Ralph Miller (surveyor and fix it guy) to come take a look. Ralph suggested that our dorade boxes (dorades are basically wind scoops – the scoop is on deck and there’s a vent that lets air into the boat) were mounted poorly and could be causing our leak. He was also shocked to see the rather small 1” hole air vent in our cabin. So Ralph and Mark worked on making the dorade boxes less leaky and making the vent hole 4”. There was lots of hole-making (not really what you want to see on your freshly painted deck) and epoxy work going on and after 5 hours, we had 3 repaired dorade boxes and enlarged vents.
It was the first sunny day we’d had since Monday, Nov. 13 so we didn’t want to waste a good deck painting day. Ralph left around 3pm and we started right away putting down the first coat of colour (2nd coat of paint) on the forward upper deck and the port aft deck. It was getting dark and damp as we finished a couple of hours later, but it was great to finally get another coat down!
Sunday (Nov. 19) was another beautiful day and we attacked our jobs with earnest! I finished the last 2 coats of yellow paint on the anchor chain. This paint marks every 25ft so we know how much chain has been let out. Mark worked on installing the new charge regulator for the engine’s alternator. The last regulator broke in the Bahamas last season. After lunch we put the last coat of colour on the 2 deck areas plus the binnacle in the cockpit.
Alizarin and Daydreams had arrived in St. Augustine Sunday afternoon so we made a plan to all meet up for dinner. St. Augustine does a Christmas lights thing every year and many people travel to the downtown area to see the lights. This weekend was the first official weekend of the lights and it was packed!! It took us an 1.5 to get seated for dinner and it took a very long time to get our food. But our server was awesome – she brought us lots of bread and crab soup (free of charge), plus because we waited so long, they gave us 2 free desserts. Even though our whole dinner evening was about 4 hours – we had a great time visiting and relaxing.
So here we are – the start of a new work week. It Monday, Nov. 20 and we have about 2 more weeks to complete all the must be done jobs before we head south to Vero Beach. Time to get working!!
(Just a reminder – the smaller photos are in gallery mode. If you click on the first photo they will enlarge and you can scroll through all the photos that are in the “gallery”. This post has 2 gallery sets – the vent holes and the Christmas lights in St. Augustine. Enjoy)
Crimson Kathryn and her crew 