Finally, two nice days

This weekend was nice after five days of rain. The good news is our new hatch didn't leak and the first thing we did was to mask the hatch and apply deck paint around it to cover the scuffs and stains left after removing the old one. It's not a very good picture but the result was a nice, neat installation.

We also found some time to mount our Icom IC-V8000 ham radio on the bridge. We wrote about fabricating a mount for for this radio last winter and we had everything done except the antenna. We ended up using a GAM Electronics antenna that was tuned to  2-meters. These antennas are very well made and don't require a ground reference. In fact, with the GAM adapter, it mounts on a 4-ft. Shakespeare marine antenna extension so no wires show. After soldering on the antenna connector, we made our first contact with a station in Waterford, CT via a repeater nearby in Norwich.

But this blog is about boats so we'll get back to that subject.

On Sunday morning, we started the day washing the boat. We used one of those green "scrubby" pads to peel off the grime from the deck and cabin sides and there was a lot of it. The boat really hasn't bee washed thoroughly this year so this took a little time.

After that, Bill headed down to the engine space to "check the fluids." We know, checking the fluid levels in the engines, transmissions and v-drives isn't something that most boat owners do often but our machinery is 33 years old and we try to respect that. So, down we went. Yes, you have to crawl all the way to the back of the engines to check the v-drives.

Turns out, the fluid levels were all good.

Weather permitting, we're heading out to Greenport, Long Island next weekend. We were going to take the boat over to the fuel dock and spend some money on refueling but it didn't make much sense to untie all the lines, hoses and cables just to refuel and then have to do it all again when we came back to the dock.

New dog on A-dock

Our dockmates John and Joanne arrived this weekend with a new puppy. She's a back lab and just seven weeks old. No one on the dock could encounter this beautiful young puppy without stopping to pet her and she loved the attention. She pees on the dock right now but in a few weeks, she'll grow into those big paws and we hope, become a great boat dog.

Here she is with her boss, John, and our friends Janie and Lou.

Don't you just love that face? We mean the dog's face.