Easter weekend...

Happy Easter, everyone.

The weather was perfect and we began Saturday morning with a repair job to the top panel on our bridge enclosure. It had to be taken down so we could clean it. It's been exposed in the shed all winter and really needed a good cleaning. (Note to self: Next winter, throw a tarp over the top so we won't have to go through this again.)

It seems that when Bill took the top down last weekend, he managed to pull one of the zippers loose from the top. That piece is one of two that that hold the center bow on place. It was only about six inches that needed to be re-attached and luckily Frances, expert seamstress that she is, arrived with special needles and thread to sew the end of the zipper back in place. It took a while but it looks like it will hold nicely.

Once that was done, Frances treated the remaining stitching with something called Fray-Check, which adds a lot of strength to the old thread.

We accomplished this repair by hanging the top from the deck that runs across the back of the house. We hold the top in place with a half dozen spring clips. Once the sewing was complete, we washed the outside of the top with a hose. We've done this many times before and we find a good method is to spray some household cleaning solution across the top of the Sunbrella and then hose it down from the top, which allows the cleaner to flow down over the top when we hit it with the hose. Nice to see the brown rinse water become clear as we run the hose across it a number of times.

Once the top was really dry, we treated it with 303 Fabric Guard Water Repellant. Paying $26 for 32 ounces of this stuff is close to larceny but we have to admit, 303 really works. We're not even sure that we needed to apply the 303 to this top again. It never leaked a drop last summer (even in some really heavy rain storms) but since we had the top up there to repair, why not? Luckily, we had some left over from last year.

High tension on the fly bridge

Once we arrived at the boat, it was time to correct an old problem.

Several years ago, we had a surprise autumn storm that dumped a foot or more of snow on us in October. Act Three was still in the water waiting to be hauled out. So much snow accumulated on the bridge enclosure top, that it bent the stainless tubing that supports the top. The side curtains still fit but the entire enclose was loose and we decided to see if we could fix that outward bow.

Our solution (if it works) was to connect a cable between the two bent sections and use two turnbuckles to slowly pull the two sides together. We turned each one to tighten up until you could play middle C on the cable.

Really poor river level forecasts

We wish that everyone would realize that the Connecticut River rises above its normal level every spring. Since it drains a large portion of Vermont, New Hampshire and a lot of western Massachusetts, to say nothing of just about all of central Connecticut, why are we seeing "flood warnings" from every TV station and even the National Weather Service, all of which should know better?  We have some ideas about why this occurs, but we won't bore you with them.

As it is, our April 29 launch date will be delayed. That's not a concern for us, since we assumed that the freshet would come and then go, which it is doing now.

Easter Sunday

We were interested in getting the bridge enclosure up, now that it was repaired and cleaned. First, we had to remove our crazy cable that was supposed to straighten the center bow on the bridge enclosure. It actually did, a little. The starboard bow was much more true; the port side wasn't. The top looks and fits fine and it's just us who see the slight bend.  We'll try again next winter, maybe.

We had intended to touch up the bottom paint today but we badly underestimated the time it took to clean both sides of each of the 11 side curtains and then re-mount each one. It ended up taking the entire afternoon but we have the cleanest bridge windows you have ever seen.

Here's a little video of Frances sewing the top followed by some shots of the river as it slowly began to recede.