The Project(s) That Couldn’t (in Charleston, SC)

10-month old Zephyr experiences ice cubes for the first time in the cockpit

Lest you think it’s all hot chocolate bars and sunrises… You know the little engine that could? We’ve got the projects that couldn’t.

Charleston sunset through the porthold from Charleston Harbor Marina

There were the weather cloths that just needed a few grommets to finish them off… an Amazon deal (for 1000 grommets… your first clue 😉 ) on nickel-plated steel that ended up rusting to bits within literally DAYS of installation. Fun fact: removing grommets is way less fun than installing them.

There was the anchor locker drain hose that needed replacing (let’s just say that the old hose install involved a decent amount of duct tape…). Seemed simple until we discovered that the marine store shipped us the wrong size of hose. Discovered, mind you, after we’d emptied the entire vberth storage locker into the main area, I’d climbed down into said locker, and Jon was full on baby wrangling Zephyr (who was *certain* he’d be most helpful in my lap, as I juggled heat guns and holesaws, trying to make the hose situation work).

The swim ladder hardware we installed (turns out we haven’t swum off the boat in YEARS) didn’t actually work with our swim ladder (but a little metal filing by Jonathan at least fixed that one).

The hole for the cockpit speakers (which we’ve been carrying around in a locker for literally 8 years!) ended up an inch too high (blame Zephyr) so now we’ve got a 7” hole in the cockpit to patch (and another hole to drill! Maybe we’ll have speakers in 8 more years…)

The port integral water tank work (a saga too long and unresolved to share in entirety) created such a fiberglass dust cloud that I literally sent Jon to buy (another) Festool Hepa vacuum. We left the other one in Maine, thinking we’d never need a huge vacuum on the boat… but it’s been one of the more missed items! So off to buy a vacuum to finish a dusty project Jon went. Zephyr and I hung out by the pool, under J’s orders to stay out of the chemical muck.

And then just when we thought we’d gotten a handle on the biggies and had a weather window for our jump to Florida, the B&G Vulcan 9 radar gave us a “No Radar” message (in the midst of the worst fog we’ve had since leaving Maine, of course). This puppy is less than a year old, so the good folks at B&G shipped us a new radome immediately… but unfortunately they shipped it to our billing address instead of our current mailing address, so there’s a new $1700 radome on its way to snowy Maine, where it’s really not that useful to us…

#facepalm

It’s a cruising truism that this life is about working on your boat in exotic destinations… so I guess I should be grateful that we at least like our boat and we like working on her!

And — it goes without saying — we’re enjoying Charleston and the marina here, so a few more weeks (waiting for our lost little radome to finish its tour of the United States of America and arrive in South Carolina) won’t hurt 😉

LMK


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