As you can see, Pooka the boat cat, is no longer content to sit quietly in the salon. He now climbs the ladder to the bridge and after this shot was taken, we opened the canvas and sure enough, up he went, happy to find a new place to explore. After a thorough sniff of everything, he came back down. He's not as good coming down as he is going up, but he'll learn, we're sure.
If you've been reading this blog, you know that we have been rehabilitating the outside of the wall that surrounds the sliding door. We finished the trim last weekend and on Saturday, we taped again to protect our trim. We then applied one coat of Petitt Easypoxy paint, using the same color that we had used on the deck. When we paint, Bill applies the paint and Frances goes back over the surface to make sure it's perfect.
The whole project looked great but as we often comment as we do these things, no one will ever notice it because it simply looks the way it should, rather than weathered and dirty. So many of the things we have done to our Silverton fall into this category but we remember how the boat looked when we got it and we take a lot of satisfaction from working on making it look good and function the way it should.
After painting, Frances took a break to chat with our friend and dockmate Joanne. Joanne was drinking wine and plucking out fresh blueberries. Nice way to get some extra nourishment.
We had a number of other small jobs on our list and we got them all done on Sunday. They aren't very exciting but they make life on the boat easier.
Frances devised a way to keep the expandable deck hose inside its circular holder. All that was needed was to drill a couple of holes and add some zip ties. Good engineering on Frances' part.
We also found some clips at Defender marine that could be used to store the oars that we use with our inflatable. Those oars always seemed to be in the way. We mounted the clips up under the edge of the cockpit. Frances stood back and let me know when the clips were in exactly the right spots.
We also checked the fluids in the engines, transmissions and v-drives (no fluids needed) and we fired the old girls up and let them come up to temperature. We managed to raise the idle speed of the starboard engine just a little to give us just a more bite when backing into a slip.
When you raise the engine hatches and start the engines, a few dockmates always come over to see what we're doing. (We do the same thing when someone else has their engine hatch up. It's a very guy thing.)
John Hanks, a dockmate who is ex-Navy, a diesel engine technician and very knowledgeable about boats, asked about the capacity of our water tank which is mounted outboard of our starboard engine. We told him that it holds 50 gallons of water and was full. He suggested dumping most of that water to save weight and fuel.
He was right, of course. Water weighs 8.4 lbs per gallon so we were dragging around about 420 lbs. of extra weight. The only time we use the water in that tank is while underway and we don't drink it but use it to flush the head (one pint per flush) or to wash hands, etc. We could easily get away with 10 gallons or so, so we opened faucets and shed about 336 lbs. of unneeded weight.
If we raft up with others or spend some time on a mooring, that water would be very useful to have but for now, our next stop is Block Island, where we won't need it.
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