Life in Boatland

 Today was finish washing the boat day.  We scrubbed the hull to get all the grime and fly spots off. That only took 45 minutes.  I decided the covers for the cap rails looked pretty bad too so I threw those down on the dock and scrubbed them too.  Next, I had to finish washing the shade screens for all the windows.  Then I decided the boat looked pretty good except the decks were getting dirty so I used the hose to wash down all the nonskid and then I decided it looked pretty good.  It’s hard not to get sidetracked when you see another project that needs attention only this time I’d run out of steam.  We cleaned up all our buckets and brushes mess and it was close enough to lunch time.  I fell asleep on the settee (sofa) promptly after that.  After a 90 minute nap we got cleaned up and I pulled out my sewing machine.  I fixed a shirt, made a tablecloth and then tackled a fabric box to put on the shelf  beside the bed to hide stuff ...

 Eric was here on time this morning but oops, we overslept.  I think Eric and I are officially friends now as he has seen me right out of bed with stunning nursing home hair, no makeup or bra.  He worked on more wiring and today we have amazing music throughout the boat. With it being weekend, the rest of the boat is still a huge mess until Eric can finish, something, in the lazarette.  I did some laundry up in the marina and met a nice lady, her name was Pam too, they are transplanted from England, then Colorado. About 3-4  of our neighbors pulled out this morning, lucky them! Oh, and the water leak on the bow got fixed, again,  Hopefully for good.  We met some more nice people on a sailboat and they had the cutest, and I mean, cutest puppy.  It was 5 months old and weighed 2.5#, tiny little thing.  Her name was Skipper and her brother is a 110# goldendoodle. We didn’t meet him but I did get to hold Skipper and be greeted with little tiny pu...

 Jeff Merrill was our broker when we bought Painkiller, he did a great job (sorry a shameless plug for Jeff). He is here at Deltaville Marina to put together a listing to sell a boat.  He saw Painkiller at the dock and called us.  David went over to help him do some filming for the listing. We got to go out to dinner, a pretty spot for the Merroir Restaurant. We had a great time catching up on family and boating adventures. Eric was here this morning installing a card reader on the MFD (multi function display, an electronics thing),  a much easier job than working on the stabilizer.  We received a part today that we have been waiting and waiting for.  More progress, we’re so close.  We can start watching for a good weather window because we will be running in the Atlantic off the New Jersey coast, soon I hope! Cheers! Jeff  Merrill.

 Since Eric got all the hoses off yesterday, we drove all the dead hoses 90 minutes away to a company that is going to make new ones for us.  We should get the news ones back in 2days.  Hopefully Monday Eric will be back to put all the hoses back on and put the engine room back in order.  And then….we can actually leave the marina and get started on the journey to Maine.   We stopped on the way home and picked up some bbq for dinner.  I stopped at the marina community garden and picked a small head of cabbage to make some cole slaw and picked some okra for dinner.  We had some orange tomatoes and baby yellow crookneck squash too, all fresh from the garden🐖🥕🥬

 Poor Eric. He spent the day in the engine room again, pulling the hydraulic hoses off as part of the solution to the stabilizer problem.  Much swearing was heard again.  He did however get all the remaining hoses off, phew, was he glad that was over with.  Up in the pilot house the monitor was telling us the black water tank was full so I got the dock guy’s attention and we proceeded to try and try again to pump out the tank.  It just wasn’t going right.  David decided that he needed to check out the system.  We cleaned out the vent and cleaned the tank sensor. He even took the top off of the poop tank to see if it really was empty or full or what.  Seems there was positive pressure in the tank (there shouldn’t be) which means it starting hissing and spewing out it’s contents.  Can you say SMELL BADDDD!!  The entire boat was gag worthy. The smell wafted into the engine room where poor Eric was and he couldn’t escape it. We turned off th...

 I slept later than I should have, while I was conked out, David washed the shady side of the boat.  Then Eric (the poor boat guy that drew the short straw and has to work on our stabilizer) showed up and started taking things apart.  He had to take the step out in the engine room to get to the thingy under it that was blocking the doodad so he could actually reach the part he was looking for.  He managed to get 3 of the 8 hoses off, he used up his allotment of bad words and grumpiness for a week just in the 8 hours today.  I feel bad he has to deal with this repair, his area of expertise is really electronics and wiring and such. He is normally always in a good mood and joking but this stabilizer thing is an ugly job.  After Eric left for the day, we decided to finish washing the boat, it goes much faster with 2 people.  The boat looks great….until you look at the hull so that is tomorrow’s job and I still have 5 shade coverings for the windows to was...

 Sunday.  Boat washing day or more exactly, half a boat washing day.  We started on the flybridge, oh my goodness, the greasy dirt was everywhere, not to mention all the dead bugs.  Then we did the bow, same story. I got sidetracked and decided to wash the shade coverings for all the windows.  I took them down on the dock, laid them out and started scrubbing.  First I started with just boat soap water, that was useless. I thought I would try Dawn dish soap, much better.  I used the brush like a mop and worked them over.  The last product was just simple green to try and remove some of the black marks from the “the old owner never changed the windshield wipers”, and they were old and had started melting, leaving bad black marks all over.  The simple green worked a little bit but by then David had washed the front of the boat and was running out of steam, as was I.  With that, we decided not to take the boat out, there is just too much stu...

 The Farmer’s Market was a hit!  I found some great fruits and veggies and a few things Santa thought I should get.  Eric, our favorite boat guy came down to check things out real quick to make we can take the boat out tomorrow for a “3 hour tour “. It’s been so long since we have had the big rumbler going, it will be music to our ears.  There is a Revolutionary War Museum in Yorktown and we decided to take a look.  We walked through the inside presentations, watched some videos, read the timelines and biographies of the influential people that made such a difference in our American history.  We went outside to walk through the gardens.  I always find that fascinating! There were the usual plants but today, I’ve never seen before, a peanut plant….with peanuts attached to the root system, soooo very cool.  There were demonstrations going on that we stopped to listen to.  One was an example of how they made flax plants into fibers for clothing,...

 Here are a few repairs we’ve done. 1.  Updated some electronics so they communicate and stop arguing amongst themselves.  This should prevent the GPS going out ever again, yikes that was a scary day. 2.  Changed out the sanitary lines.  All the smelly hoses from sinks, showers and toilets now smell like new baby dolls at Christmas. 3.  Added a cruising alternator so we don’t have to run the generator under way to charge all the batteries. 4.  Added underwater lights off the back deck. This was just for fun. 5.  Installed a camera on the back deck so we can see boating traffic behind us.  You don’t want to be Mr. Magoo on the water. 6.  Replaced the hoses on the back deck shower, they were leaking all our fresh water into the lazarette, a potentially very dangerous situation. 7.  Replaced the hoses on the bow faucet because they were rotting. 8.  Put in a new water pump so every time you turned water on anywhere you didn’t have...

 I had crab for dinner! The entire tablespoon of meat I got was delicious. I guess I can scratch that off the bucket list, ha. So I have decided to do some repairs explanations for you.  I talk so much about them but never anything specific.  Some of the things we have fixed are more important to me than others.  For instance, the extra freezer in the lazarette got fixed.  The air conditioning was freezing up a couple of times a day, we had to turn the heater on to melt all the ice and when it’s the middle of July in Virginia, you really don’t need the extra heat inside the boat. So I was happy when that started working again.  The other fix that I really appreciate is the fresh water pump.  That pump runs every faucet and shower on the boat and it would get stuck in the on position.  We would have to run upstairs to the electrical breaker box and turn off the breaker before the pump burned up.  That happened a dozen times a day so I was very...

 There’s a little roadside stand that sells local produce, blackberries and has an small assortment of fresh seafood and a field of you pick flowers.  The blackberry field had been stripped a couple of days ago so no  cobbler tonight. I did pick up some amazing orange tomatoes, a cantaloupe and a bunch of flowers.  It was $3 for a bouquet you could hold in your hand or $5 for an entire basketful.  I chose the basket. I ended up with 4 big vases full (by vases I mean plastic New Orleans LaFittes Bar cups, ha).  Next, I stopped at the little local market for some chicken parts to try crabbing again.  Of all the times we pulled up the traps, we got 2 crabs, too small in size of crabs that we had to throw back.  Oh well, tomorrow’s another day. Today’s thunderstorm.  Crabbing,successfully. Little baby crab crawling around the dock. One of 4 bouquets of zinnias. Baby crab, crawling around. Those yummy orange tomatoes from the roadside stand.

 One of my favorite things to do is to go out to breakfast.  I found a place that had gluten free pancakes, they were actually pretty good.  David had a cheeseburger so we were both happy campers, win-win!   We went to Jamestown, it was very fun.  There were a lot of exhibits open and the demonstrations were fun to watch.  I loved the chickens running around!  We drove to Yorktown next, it had a lot of historical sites, a lot of people wandering around and not much parking, ha. We made our way back to the boat, we’re pooped, even Ellie is dragging.  Our passes are good for 7 days so I think we will go back in the next couple of days and look around Yorktown a little more. Decent weather held for today, tomorrow should be a little warmer so we’ll definitely stay on the shady side of the street. Blacksmith. Using a lathe that works with ropes and a foot pedal. Rooms in the home of a mid level family. Church, you wouldn’t fall asleep in those pews. ...