Blog Update May 22 to 31

Blog update
Well this is really over due, sorry to the loyal readers. Nice to hear from you guys too. There is an easy way to leave comments and we really enjoy hearing about your adventures too.

May 22 to ???
Saturday. We got back to the boat today. Thankfully things started moving Friday night. My digestive system just didn’t want to get going, so after surgery on Monday, and no digestive action by Friday, the doc gave me a bunch more stuff to drink, colonoscopy stuff, and a enema, her the last words were, if nothing happens tonight go to the E.R. asap. Well thats all it took and about an hour later the plumbing was working. No E.R. for me. We were getting really tired of living in the hotel anyway and were glad that this milestone had occurred so we could get on with the boat re-fit.
Got back to the boat in theafternoon on Saturday and got started on my list. Got Patti’s new Galley fluorescent light in, boy what a difference that made. I had order a new LED for the main salon and it was waiting for us when we got back so I installed that. The current lights (incandescent) get too hot and use too many amps. The new light is great, even puts out at least as much light as the old bulbs. I will order more on Monday.

Sunday was new sink faucet day. another struggle with Murphy over the last month. To the point that I gave up for a while. Do you have any idea how many different styles of connections there are for kitchen sink faucets. The other real problem was fitting a household faucet into marine galley plumbing. It works and no leaks yet, knock on wood.

Next thing was to build the mount for the Garmin chart plotter. Got to use my “work bench in box again”. This time it was for the table saw. Yes that right I said table saw. The 5 inch skill saw mounts in the top of the box with just a couple of clicks, hit the switch and NOTHING. what the heck. So OUT came the instructions, ( for those that know me , yes I did say what the heck and yes I did read the instructions, I know that’s hard to believe). The engineers had designed the table saw so that it would not run if the safety shield was not installed. Safety shield, I don’t need no stinking safety shield’. (Sorry for the digression to the movie, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) I am very careful with power tools. My Dad instilled a great respect for things with spinning blades. I don’t know how many times I heard about the time he tried to cut off a couple of fingers with his “Shop Smith” after he had just gotten it.

The GPS mount is complete and now I am going to set everything up as a dry run before I start drilling holes in the boat. I kept hearing Grandpa Axel, “measure twice and cut once” who was a great finish carpenter. No…. not from Finland, but 100% Norweigen. It would always amaze me when he would chuckle as I tried to cut a 2x4, I would get out the square, draw lines to follow and then went at it either with the skill saw or the hand saw. Grandpa would smile and chuckle, and the gently take the piece from me, ask me how long it needed to be, get out his tape measure, make one tick mark on a corner. He would then very nonchalantly take the hand saw, put the piece on the stool, and proceed to make a cut, by hand in a 2x4 with one mark, that was square any or how many ways you bothered to measure it. He took carpentry to an art form.

Sunday was really hot, but did cool off for a nice evening by 8 pm., Started on the other navigation stuff Monday morning, Then got a call from Justin Knobel and Jessica Josephs. They are in town, well headed to Jessup Georgia anyway, that’s close right!!!!!!. Any way they took the red eye and had a day to explore Florida and they decided to come and pay us a visit. Had a great time showing off the boat and the work we have been doing, and then went out for lunch. I am sure the Patti was bored to tears with all of the R… talk but it was fun to catch up on the old office.

Back to the GPS and got the chart plotter working, now to wire the AIS and the Satellite weather radio. Everything is just hanging out in the cockpit until I am sure that all the components talk to each other, then I will make the final install. I know where it will all go I think, but Murphy hasn’t approved yet, and we all know he has the final say.

We thought we were so smart. We took all of our CD’s and ripped them to our laptops. Then when we wanted to listen to any of our music on the boat then it was just a matter of plugging into the boat stereo and life would be perfect. RIGHT. We are missing one important component. A stereo on the boat has no mp3 or usb plug. OOOOPPPPPPPPSSSSSSSS.

The solution was simple,. I had to go to West Marine anyway. This has to be the easiest install ever. I was not very optimistic, lots of wires in the wiring harness on radios these days so I was sure that I was in for an interesting evening of ok the yellow strip wire from the old harenss goes to this and that corresponds to the blue wire on the new harness. Wel the old radio slid out the old harness fit right into the new radio, hooked up the antenna dn turned on the power. Amazing, it works, Now that was amazing.

One of the many boats that we looked over the last couple of years was a “Cal Jensen 46” that was moored at Brunswick Ga., 2 slips away from where Dream Ketcher was moored by the Previous owner. (P.O.) We looked at the Cal Jensen and quickly ruled it out. It is a very big boat and really looks like a Motor sailor rather than an offshore sailboat. Well anyway the Cal Jensen showed up next to us in the yard here at Green Cove Springs. The story, A gentlemen from Australia bought the boat and is here with 3 of his Aussie buddies, prepping the boat for the trip home to Australia. Really nice guys, 2 of them are Quantas pilots and the boat owner is now retired and done quite a bit of sailing, Two of the crew have done lots of deliveries around the southern oceans and the fourth crew is an offshore rookie. These guys are a kick in the butt. I wish I could record our conversations, the terminology and the slang terms are so interesting/funny. I can’t think of any at this moment but trust me it is really entertaining. It kind of takes a minute to get the drift sometimes, then you find your self checkling at a joke they made 3 minutes ago, and they look at you like “Your just getting that now”.

We picked the sails up from the sailmaker this week, and we took the spinnaker in to measure. We
don’t have a decent place to drag it out here so I thought the sail loft would be the best place to do that.
That thing is huge and there is no way Patti and I would fly a chute (sailor talk for Spinnaker). We drug
the spinnaker out of the bag and out of the sock only to eventually figure out that it is not a
symmetrical spinnaker, it is a drifter, 1.5 oz cloth. Perfect.!!! And with a sock. The sock needs to be
rigged still but that is relatively easy. A sock is exactly that. A tapered sleeve that has a rigid ring on
the bottom. The ring is rigged with a loop of line that allows you to host the ring that releases the sail.

I can’t wait to fly it. Patti is a little hesitant. I told her that we would take it easy, Drop
everything and the launch the drifter just to see how big it looks on the water. Sails always look way
bigger on the ground. The luff on this thing is 55vor 56 feet. Should be a blast. I think we could
probably carry it 12 to 15 knots of breeze. Probably won’t though. It will be a real tiger by the tail at
15 knots and things always happen at hyperspace speed whenthe wind kicks up and you have way too
much sail up.




We finally got around tp getting the home port on the transom. We got out the ladder and the stuff and then one of our aussie neighbors showed up to chat for a bit. Before we knew it it was getting real dark, so as we started taping the homeport onto the transom one of our other neighbors came by and after looking at how we were going about things, said alright guys let me do this, It is to important to get messed up. Well that’s close to what he said anyway. So “Dave the Welder” took over and now it is done, the finished product. I will post a pick.

Wednesday was working the engine day. Spent all morning with Rick, getting the cutless bearing installed. Well more like pounded in. You see the old cutless was frozen to the shaft and would just turn inside the shaft log. The shaft log was not 2” any more, We tried a 2” cutless bearing but it was way to loose. So the next size up was 2 1/8”. Well that meant using a drill motor and the grinding pads used for boring out engine cylinders. Took a long time but finally got it to the right size. Well almost to the right size. We ended up with an 8 pound sledge and a block of wood and a whole lot of muscle but it finally went in flush. That took until lunch, after lunch it was time to put in the prop shaft and the dripless. Rick had to go work on another boat so I spent the rest of the day trying to get the engine alignment right. That is going to be a real exercise in patience. Ended up cutting off a 15/16 end wrench so it was only 6” long and then grinding off most of the horns so that it would fit into the underside of the engine mount bracket. FUN!!!!!!!!!!. I got the rest of the engine mount bolts in and got the alignment a lot closer, but will work on that some more tomorrow. I can’t wait!!!!!!!! I did get the vertical alignment very close, but anm not having any luck with the horizontal alignment.

Decided to upgrade the Barbecue propane plumbing so that if I needed to change any of the fittings in the propane locker that go to the Barbie, then I wouldn’t have to disconnect everything . Next was mounting the new Barbie on the aft Port railing. Will be interesting to see if the mounting hardware can hold up the Barbie. That ended up being a breeze.

Early on the week Austin and Cindy called and wanted to meet us somewhere between Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Jacksonville. Seems it was time for Cindy to move to Atlanta for her summer intership and it was in Atlanta this time. Well we decided to meet in Charleston S.C. Not in the middle, but certainly an interesting place to explore. Stayed at the Charleston Marriott (courtesy of Austins employee benefit) and had a great time. We had a nice dinner at A.W. Shucks. Mahi Mahi, Shucks famous seafood casserole smothered in 3 cheeses and a bucket of Crabs for the girls. Next morning went exploring and found the market place where we had toasted open face sandwiches for breakfast on the lawn at this cool park. Then it was off for a tour of Fort Sumpter. Boy was that ever fun. A 30 minute boat ride gets you to the Fort. The bummer is that you only get to spend a little over an hour on the island. There is so much Cvil war history here that it would be really nice to have been able to spend more time here. I was really looking forward to the boat ride since the Fort is at the entrance to Charleston Harbor and gave me a chance to look at the harbor entrance from the ocean side.

There was a pretty good breeze blowing so there were lots of sailboats out and about. All sizes and configurations. Some cruisers and lots of familys out for an afternoons sail. It sure seemed to me that the wind was blowing harder then the forecast. We were at lunch at this really great Barbecue place, I checked the NWS forecast for Charleston and found that the official forecast was for 10 to 15 knots fro the SE. Would have been a great day to sail up the coast . We should be back here in Dream Ketcher in a month or so. It’s nearly 300 miles from here to there so it will take a little while.


Still think our splash date will be sometime around the 10th of June. We will then spend a few days working on stuff that we can’t do here “on the Hard”. I have to check out all of the running lights on the main and the mizzen masts. Only one of them works and I get to find out what is wrong with the rest.
The list is actually getting longer but the list of things to do before we splash and the list of things to do before we head north are both slowly getting shorter.

Finally finished finding and servicing all of the seacocks. Had to scrounge around for a cheater pipe, ended up with a piece of thick walled PVC, it worked great as long as there was room to use it. I ended up with the old boiling water trick on one that wouldn’t even come apart when I had the lock nuts off. Well all is done now. Then it was back to the Garmin stuff. Found the home for the AIS and started feeding wires.

Should get the engine stuff finished up tomorrow and then finish up the garmin stuff, then on to the windlass and the new forward head and replace the lid on the seachest.

Well enough for now. Looking forward to reading your comments. Let me know what you would like to read more about.

I will get the admiral, (who is currently napping on the setee) to post something more interesting for the girls.

Captain Kook and the Sleeping Admiral. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz